Read my lips: The politics of collection development

Abstract

Politics of the non-rhetorical variety do occupy an important place in the drafting of both collection development policies and approval plan profiles. Indeed, librarians must become politically adept if they hope to successfully implement either one. The reasons are simple: if we accept a non-governmental definition of politics as “the total complex of relations between people in society,” then we can see that neither collection development policies nor approval profiles can or should be developed in isolation-especially, in a microcosm as fiercely protective of its freedom of speech and the ideal of participatory governance as is academe. As such policies serve, and have an impact upon, most if not all people who inhabit our little academic worlds, it only stands to reason that we should want to involve as many of those people as possible or, at least that we should strive to make certain everyone is represented one way or another. For example, at Kent State, we cannot afford any full-time bibliographers other than me, and so we have established a network of what we term “library liaisons.” These are library faculty members who endeavor to cover at least one subject discipline. Their counterpart in each of those disciplines is termed the “departmental representative,” and there is a one-toone interface. Thus, when we re-evaluated our approval plan a year and a half ago, using the standards developed by John Reidelbach and Gary Shirk, we involved as many people as possible: not only library administrators and collection development personnel, but also our liaison librarians, their departmental counterparts, and department chairs. That meant that whatever decision we made-right or wrong, good or bad-would at least have a broad base of support. That is one reason why collection development policies are worth the time to write: for the process as much as for the final product. The very act of getting disparate people together and then trying to build consensus on any given topic is valuable in and of itself. It is politically astute, in that it greases the skids for approval of whatever one has in mind; but, equally significant is the fact that it brings a wide variety of experiences and perspectives to bear on a common problem. It may not always be true that two heads are better than one,