That’s how it ought to be done in academic libraries. It does take a lot of librarians. You have a librarian for each subject area, which can be pretty granular depending on the size/budget of the library. My academic library has a business librarian who focuses on acquiring and weeding the business section. She has an undergrad degree in something businessy and an MSLis.
Now, my academic library has been subject to funding cuts and so we don’t do everything we ought to do, especially in areas that aren’t major majors at our school, which is frustrating AF. We rely more on professors suggesting acquisitions.
Public libraries have a broader remit, so often can go with purchasing what’s requested by their patrons and what’s on lists of good new books. They still have to know their subject matter to weed properly, especially in the nonfiction areas. Fiction tends to be weeded based on condition and circulation stats, especially in public libraries.
(weeding is getting rid of books that no longer suit the collection. Easy examples: children’s book that was dropped in the mud. children’s book that still lists Pluto as a planet).
Oh! As a librarian, you can also get pre-release versions of books to evaluate for your library. It’s a nice perk to read things months before it comes out. (you have to request them from the publisher, but publishers like sending these to librarians because librarians buy lots of books and talk to other people that buy lots of books)
Wow, I feel that’s something we should bring back. Professors many a times get too specialized. A librarian taking care of a broad category would bring balance. Though I suppose having more than 100~200 such libraries in an economy the size of US or EU feels excessive too.
At my college, at least, we’re very undergrad-focused. So the professors tend to request things that are good for those sorts of classes. There’s about 3,700 academic libraries in the USA.
We also subscribe to some large collections of ebooks, which we don’t individually curate. We have the ability to add on individual books to our ebook collection, but most come in, say, the EBSCOhost eBooks Academic Subscription Collection. I have Opinions about ebooks vs physical books in a library setting (mostly, I don’t like renting books and prefer something a publisher can’t take away on a whim). But ebooks sure are convenient for students, especially if they’re taking classes remotely. COVID was a push towards ebooks.
Mini rant: our physical book collection needs weeding, but we don’t have the budget we’d like for new books. Whenever I pull together a display for, say, LGBTQ Pride, I have to decide whether to include a copy of “Poetry of Sappho” from the 1930s that looks like it’s from the 1930s[derogatory]–no dust cover, just blue paperboard. No young adult’s going to walk by a worn blue rectangle and say “yes, I want to pick that up and read it”.
I want to put together an attractive display and a lot of my options are ugly.
And weeding’s complicated, too. You can’t just say “oh, this is 30 years old, get rid of it”. That tends to work in Science/Tech/Medicine, but a 30-year-old biography might be the only one written on a person. Is there a newer one we should get? Is the older one bad for some irredeemable way, or is it bad in an interesting way? (example: written by someone super biased in favor of the subject, but the author’s biases are intriguing, or they’re the only biographer to actually talk to the subject, that sort of thing)
That’s how it ought to be done in academic libraries. It does take a lot of librarians. You have a librarian for each subject area, which can be pretty granular depending on the size/budget of the library. My academic library has a business librarian who focuses on acquiring and weeding the business section. She has an undergrad degree in something businessy and an MSLis.
Now, my academic library has been subject to funding cuts and so we don’t do everything we ought to do, especially in areas that aren’t major majors at our school, which is frustrating AF. We rely more on professors suggesting acquisitions.
Public libraries have a broader remit, so often can go with purchasing what’s requested by their patrons and what’s on lists of good new books. They still have to know their subject matter to weed properly, especially in the nonfiction areas. Fiction tends to be weeded based on condition and circulation stats, especially in public libraries. (weeding is getting rid of books that no longer suit the collection. Easy examples: children’s book that was dropped in the mud. children’s book that still lists Pluto as a planet).
Oh! As a librarian, you can also get pre-release versions of books to evaluate for your library. It’s a nice perk to read things months before it comes out. (you have to request them from the publisher, but publishers like sending these to librarians because librarians buy lots of books and talk to other people that buy lots of books)
Wow, I feel that’s something we should bring back. Professors many a times get too specialized. A librarian taking care of a broad category would bring balance. Though I suppose having more than 100~200 such libraries in an economy the size of US or EU feels excessive too.
At my college, at least, we’re very undergrad-focused. So the professors tend to request things that are good for those sorts of classes. There’s about 3,700 academic libraries in the USA.
We also subscribe to some large collections of ebooks, which we don’t individually curate. We have the ability to add on individual books to our ebook collection, but most come in, say, the EBSCOhost eBooks Academic Subscription Collection. I have Opinions about ebooks vs physical books in a library setting (mostly, I don’t like renting books and prefer something a publisher can’t take away on a whim). But ebooks sure are convenient for students, especially if they’re taking classes remotely. COVID was a push towards ebooks.
Mini rant: our physical book collection needs weeding, but we don’t have the budget we’d like for new books. Whenever I pull together a display for, say, LGBTQ Pride, I have to decide whether to include a copy of “Poetry of Sappho” from the 1930s that looks like it’s from the 1930s[derogatory]–no dust cover, just blue paperboard. No young adult’s going to walk by a worn blue rectangle and say “yes, I want to pick that up and read it”.
I want to put together an attractive display and a lot of my options are ugly.
And weeding’s complicated, too. You can’t just say “oh, this is 30 years old, get rid of it”. That tends to work in Science/Tech/Medicine, but a 30-year-old biography might be the only one written on a person. Is there a newer one we should get? Is the older one bad for some irredeemable way, or is it bad in an interesting way? (example: written by someone super biased in favor of the subject, but the author’s biases are intriguing, or they’re the only biographer to actually talk to the subject, that sort of thing)