Are there generally accepted criteria for book selection? What are they? How are they implemented: are there quantity targets for various ranges of the Dewey decimal system or what?
McLibrary. Is there a public library equivalent of, oh, Accuweather, a Pennsylvania outfit that feeds their reports to AM stations across the country (so that you think the weather announcer is at the station, when actually he or she is in PA)?
Sorry, that analogy is a stretch. But I’m wondering whether there are one or more central outfits that provide selection advice and consultation for local libraries, and whether competing ones have different biases.
Or does each head librarian have to reinvent the wheel?
Do books donated to a library help? Or is processing them actually not really worth the burden in the end? Does the revenue outweigh the paid time by a significant amount?
Has the internet expanded the used book market sufficiently so that book donations are more of a profit center? Or has the quality of the donations simply declined?
Consensus opinion among librarians:
5a. In the opinion of most librarians whom you know or have read about, what’s the typical guidance given by the local overlords? What’s the best guidance?
5b. In the opinion of most librarians whom you know or have read about, what should be the stance of locally organized fanatics or concerned citizens? (I assume it’s: the antidote to bad speech is more speech.)
Add your own questions!
SDMB Thread Reference: A Cunning Stunt, regarding a movement conservative prank during Banned Book Week.
I’m not a qualified librarian, but I did my community service (after secondary school, as a substitute for mandatory military service) at a public library and was involved in the catalogisation of newly purchased books.
Basically, the head librarians were regularly checking bestseller charts, both for fiction and non-fiction. There were also (commercial) services which would regularly publish list of books recommended for purchase; the library could buy them from this service and would get a floppy disk along with the books with all the necessary data (classification under the German equivalent of Dewey Decimal etc.) for the online catalog.
For university and other academic libraries, I supect it’s similar. Most of the professors have a quite good overview of recent publications in their field anyway and - not totally altruistically - recommend books to the library for purchase, or may even be allowed to order them on behalf of the library; in addition, the librarians certainly check book reviews in academic journals from time to time to see which recently published volumes have had an impact on debates.
I’ll try to answer these as best I can, but my position in the library has to mostly do with the A/V collection, not the books.
There are all sorts of various factors that go into book selection. Reviews, number of requests, popularity of previous books by author, popularity of other books about the subject, if the book fills a “hole” in the collection. There are not quantity targets, but I know the ALA makes suggestions on how large certain collections within the library should be (collections as in non-fiction vs fiction, not specific subjects).
Sort of, but not really. Every major library vendor offers standing order plans that will automatically send your library a collection of books based around subjects or new releases. However, I’m not sure this counts as a McLibrary as nearly every title included in a standing order plan is popular and would likely be ordered anyway.
I haven’t noticed any biases, but my library does not have much use for standing order plans as they basically charge extra to send us the books we would have ordered anyway.
It depends completely on the book. If it’s something that might circulate, it will be added. If it’s older and won’t circulate, it will be sold.
Donations have stayed roughly the same. On any given day it would rare to look in the book sale room and not find a copy of Jurassic Park, several Steven King novels, several James Patterson novels or several political titles that were released in the 90s.
In my experience (and the experience of 99% of the librarians I know), the local overlords stay out of it. They’re not librarians and policing every book would be a tremendous waste of time. Basically, most local overlords want to give us as little tax money as possible while still having a great library, which they can take credit for. If something bad happens (say a media shitstorm over children looking at porn on the PCs), the overlords step back and bellow “how could the librarians let this happen.”
No guidance is the best guidance.
The loonies are ignored. I think that’s mu favorite thing about loonies attempting to get involved with the library, as soon as they see that the librarians don’t give a shit about them, they go away. And they know that any official challenge they’d make against a book would not fly, so they don’t even bother.
Collections: Fiction, nonfiction, video, dvd. Have I got that right?
How does a library decide how much space to devote to the Incas, auto repair, Voltaire, Asimov or anthropology?
Regarding book donations:
If somebody is cleaning out their attic should they donate their box of books to the local library? Assume that they no longer want the books and they don’t believe that any of them will sell for a lot on ebay.
Put in another way, do library book sales turn a significant profit, considering the costs associated with running them?
Regarding loonies:
Well, maybe they are concerned citizens (but not potential library volunteers, to make it interesting). What then? (Should the taxpayer be forced to subsidize fictional representations of various sex acts or nonfictional coverage of popular tripe in a public library? (Well yeah, IMHO, but I can understand these concerns. What’s the standard answer?)).
I don’t think there is a master plan behind that. Libraries don’t buy all their books at once; they continously purchase new volumes and get rid of old (but not old enough to be of value) ones. Based on recommendations, the rank of a book on bestseller lists, and the frequency of similar books in their stock, they know if that new publication on auto repair is worth buying. Most libraries spare some shelf space between different sections to allow for future expansion, so there is space for new acquisitions. From time to time, the arrangement of sections within the library gets rearranged (much to the dismay of users), and if there’s absolutely no way to accomodate new books, the library will usually lobby for an extension to the building or move some books to a repository to which the public will not have access; they take up less space there.
Well, first of all everybody starts out with a collection development policy. For example, here in the periodicals section we try to keep everything that’s in the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature in our core collection, and we add things of local interest, requests, and so forth. So if you’re wondering why the hell we get South Dakota Magazine, it’s because it’s in Readers’ Guide. We argue about it all the time - some people say if we don’t have any standard rubric like that then what have we got? and I say, we can use our little brains and figure out that we need ALMOST all of the Readers’ Guide titles EXCEPT South Dakota. Hell, tape it shut for a few months and see if anybody ever opens it. But I digress.
A book collection development policy is a little different. Here in my library, various librarians select for various Dewey ranges (you might do the 300’s, or the 600’s, or the reference section.) Whoever selects for that range is expected to keep abreast of current literature in the field - they read reviews in places like Publisher’s Weekly and such, of course, but they also read subject specific stuff. For example, if you select in religion you might keep an eye on reviews in magazines like America. There’s so much money to go around for new book purchases, and I’m not sure exactly how it works but each area does get a certain amount and has relative freedom to purchase within their budgets. Obviously, efforts are made to meet the requirements for a broad, unbiased collection - if you select in religion, you might select more in Protestant devotional stuff because it’s very popular, but of course you’re going to get books on Sikhism and Wicca and Scientology as well. (You’re going to get a lot of 'em on Wicca, because they’re going to walk right out that door.) And obviously when you get Scientology books you’re going to get some from the church and some from other viewpoints.
Now, patrons can request books. What we do for book requests is: if it’s reviewed in a major publication (and not totally absolutely panned) we buy it. Easy peasy. Of course, we’re a major library with decent funding and not everybody can afford to do that.
When it comes to vanity presses and such, we do buy it (or accept your donation) if it meets certain criteria - normally we’d only do that if it has some sort of local information. For example, we’ve included some self-published books by local geneaologists, because we feel there’s enough patron interest to overcome our normal “we don’t want the book you printed in your basement” policy.
There are jobbers that send us the “regular assortment” - we use Baker and Taylor. We don’t have to sit down and tell somebody, “Yes, we’ll take the new Harry Potter book.” Everybody does, so they just send us some. In fact, we lease extra copies of popular new fiction so we don’t have to keep them past when everybody’s already read them. I don’t like giving up local control, but we do still enjoy a good bit of that (we still have catalogers.) You could call that McLibrary.
ETA - when you donate stuff, we look at it to see if it’s something we need. It probably isn’t. We sell it at our book sale. Last year we made $65,000. Thanks!
There are no hard and fast rules. It depends on what we already own, if that is still circulating, what’s coming out in the future, the condition of the books already available, what other libraries in the area have, etc, etc. It’s a whole number of different things and there’s no GQ answer. Sorry.
Yes, the library will gladly take them. Most book sales are run by volunteers so they don’t “cost” anything. It’s all pure profit (relatively speaking).
Again, there’s no one size fits all (or even most) answer to this. It’s solely up to the librarian’s discretion whether the request is for something the person wants or for something the community should have. That’s the distinction. And it varies from community to community.
I mean, frankly a lot of decisions we make don’t make a lot of sense; they’re emotional. We’ve got plenty of books that portray via text explicit sex and violence while if the same material were in a movie we wouldn’t buy the DVD. DVDs are more sensitive than magazines are more sensitive than books. <shrug>
Add reference, children’s, young adult, genre fiction, foreign language, magazines, audio books, CDs (formerly cassettes and vinyl: each time a format changes great agonizing must take place over whether to rebuy, replace, or simply add on to current collections), electronic books, graphic novels, CD-ROMs, computer software, paintings. An amazing number of things can be borrowed from libraries that you wouldn’t think of at first blush.
Most libraries normally subscribe to Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews, the three major sources of book reviews aimed at libraries. That helps them to judge quality of books. Obviously bestsellers will be bought regardless of quality, but more specialized books require some filters.
Not every library can or needs to buy every book or even every subject. In Monroe County, NY, the one I know best, there is a city library system with a central library and ten branches and nineteen town library systems, some with more than one branch. Even though 20 different funding sources underlie the county system they are all tied together with a single card catalog, interlibrary borrowing and returning privileges, and an overall buying policy.
Librarians from each of the systems get together regularly to make purchasing decisions. If a book is desired, only one of the libraries needs to physically purchase it. The book is entered into the electronic catalog for everyone to see. You can - from any library or a home computer - have that book sent to any library branch in the county. This greatly multiplies the purchasing power of any of the individual libraries.
Even so, some of the libraries specialize in certain areas. One library might do more in history, another in science. One might have bigger collections of mysteries or science fiction or romances. Some have larger CD collections, or DVDs, or graphic novels. A library in a town with a higher percentage Jewish population will have more books on Judaism, just as the supermarket in that town will have a kosher section not found elsewhere.
A lot of the questions asked are the reason why librarians are professionals who have to have a professional degree. Thousands of decisions have to be made to run a library. Each library caters to a slightly different population and needs to have individual answers. While all libraries have some superficial similarities in their collections, as someone who looks into local libraries whenever I travel I can tell you that once you get past the standard works in any field the shelves are wildly different from place to place.
IANAL (yet) but am in the last year of my master’s program and have volunteered for four different public libraries over the years.
Re: donating books
Yes, you can and should donate books. However, take a look at the books first: are they free of food stains, mildew, and insects? Is the binding in good shape? Are they free of crayon markings? Do they have all of their pages?
If not, find a place that can recycle them or throw them out. You would not believe the stuff I have found in donated books over the years–used Kleenex and condoms being some of the less pleasant items.
We flat-out refused to take software donations (no chance to test the disks to make sure they worked) and encyclopedia sets older than 2 years–take up a huge amounts of space and contain outdated political/health/science info.
Some donated books can be circulated–my volunteer time at a branch library in DC was partly spent assessing whether we could add any donated items to the collection. We served a diverse population and were always eminently grateful for donated books in Spanish, Vietnamese, etc.
Re: collection development
As Zsofia pointed out, most libraries have a collection development policy. I always enjoy traveling to the main public library when I visit another state, as you can tell a lot about the city’s population and interests from the books in the library. Demand for titles varies tremendously, and libraries have to make sure they’re meeting the needs and desires of their consumers. Many libraries have patron request forms (either online or in hard copy at the library) and definitely consider these when buying books.
Let’s go back to our concerned fanatic (though remarks on other questions are welcome).
Look, I know this is a diverse community. But we already have 147 (I counted!) books devoted to puppies and kittens. We don’t need all those. We should have maybe 5% of that. It’s offensive.
And we should have absolutely, positively no books devoted to the little twin stars: they should be banned, as they surpass acceptable community cuteness standards by a wide margin. More generally, what are the procedures and criteria for culling the collection?
For the fun of it, assume our citizen has a point as well as some community support but that he also has an obsession.
Well, does it circulate? Do people ask for more of it? What’s the condition of the books - should they just be weeded or do they need to be replaced? I mean, it doesn’t matter how much devotional Christian material we get, people want more of it.
Thanks for starting this thread, Measure for Measure. The subject has come up a lot recently in GD, and it seems that a lot of people don’t have a real understanding of how books get into the library or what librarians do.
As for my credentials, I’m an academic (university) librarian with the usual Master’s degree in library science. I serve as liaison to two academic departments and am in charge of collection development for those areas. I’ve always worked in academic libraries, so my experience with public libraries is just as a patron and occasional volunteer.
Any library is going to have a formal, written collection policy that guides selection decisions. The first public library collection policy I could pull up on Google was for the Louisville, CO library. Here’s another, more detailed one from Kaloma, IA. Each library sets its own policy, but a public library it would normally say something about collecting works of local significance (e.g. town histories) and including a variety of fiction and non-fiction to suit the tastes and research needs of the local public.
I’ve never heard of a library having a quantity target; the exact number of books isn’t usually something librarians are concerned about. If a library had two books on say motorcycle maintenance and they got checked out a lot then a decision might be made to purchase more, but it wouldn’t be like “We need exactly five more books to meet our goal!”
I’m not sure how publics handle this sort of thing, and even different academic libraries do it different ways, but at my job I’m in charge of purchasing all books relating to the two departments I serve as liaison for. I have an annual budget with which to buy books for these subject areas. Previous librarians had already determined which call number ranges corresponded to the subjects covered by my departments. It’s expected that I’ll be purchasing books that fall within these call number ranges, but I’d be able to order books that fell under other areas if relevant and necessary. (If this happened a lot, I could request that another call number range be added to my profile.) No one cares about the actual number of books I purchase, but I do have a set budget and there are some restrictions on how I can spend my allotted funds.
*Not exactly. Book vendors do have approval and leasing plans where someone on their end selects books based on a profile created by the library, though.
I’ll explain how we do things at my library. Our main collection is academic books but we also have a small collection of current popular fiction and non-fiction. We get these through the McNaughton Books subscription service. We lease current books from them, paying an annual fee to get a certain number of new books each month. After I think 1-2 years we’ll either send a book back to McNaughton or pay a small additional fee to purchase it for our main collection. The decision to purchase is primarily based on how many times the book has been checked out in the time that we’ve had it.
Our arrangement with McNaughton includes automatically getting New York Times bestsellers every month, both adult fiction and non-fiction. I believe we also get a few other books selected by McNaughton, based on what they’ve determined are or will be popular titles. Each month a set number of additional books can also be ordered from the McNaughton catalog of new adult and young adult books. We’re pretty casual about this at my library, but some libraries have policies saying they won’t order a book unless it’s been favorably reviewed in industry publications like Library Journal.
It’s possible to give the book vendor more power and have them select things based on criteria submitted by the library. For instance, if a library wanted to improve a small Mystery collection but didn’t want to devote a lot of staff time to researching which books to choose, it could ask to get x number of new mysteries each month. A more common decision would be to arrange to automatically get any new books by certain popular authors, or any new books in a popular series.
*Donated books do help, but people should understand that most donations are going to be sold. You shouldn’t donate expecting that the book will wind up on the library shelves. If the library wants it they’ll keep it, but most things people donate aren’t the sorts of things the library is going to want. If it’s not something that fits the collection policy, something the library would have purchased itself if money were no object, then it’s going to the book sale or in the trash.
Some libraries make a LOT of money from their book sales, so donating books really is helping the library even if they don’t keep the books for their collection. But please nothing that’s falling apart, moldy, or otherwise not in a condition to be sold. Those will just have to be weeded out and tossed by library staff or volunteers.
*Are you asking if libraries sell donated books online? Sometimes, but the old-fashioned basement book sale still seems to be the usual way of handling things. It’s a good community event, and it’s probably easier on the staff to organize an on-site book sale a few times a year than it would be to have someone in charge of monitoring online auctions all the time.
The only exception I’ve heard of would be when a library receives a donation of a book of better-than-average value (say an out-of-print Brian Froud art book) but that for whatever reason they don’t want to add to their own collection. People expect bargains at library book sales, and there may not be a buyer for anything priced higher than about $5. If the book could fetch $30 on eBay, the library might find it worthwhile to sell it that way.
I take it you’re referring not to the head librarian here, but the library board or dean in charge of libraries at a university. These people don’t normally have anything to do with collection management decisions. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of the board/dean being involved in purchasing decisions, and I’d expect that most librarians would object to them trying to meddle in such things. But if there were complaints from patrons about the library collection then the board/dean would likely be involved and might have to make the final call about what should be done.
*If you want to know what librarians honestly think about these “concerned citizens”, well, it involves language and terminology better suited to the Pit. But when it comes to actually dealing with these people, we’re supposed to keep our personal beliefs to ourselves and be polite and professional.
There should be some procedure in place for dealing with complaints or challenges to materials. For instance, there might be a form that the patron can fill out and submit for review by the head librarian, who would look at the offending book and determine whether it fit the collection policy. It’s at least theoretically possible that some librarian made a big mistake in purchasing, or went insane and started buying totally inappropriate materials. If the book is one that doesn’t meet the collection policy and so shouldn’t have been purchased in the first place, then it shouldn’t be a big problem for the library to remove it from circulation.
If the book meets the collection policy then ideally that should be that. If the “concerned citizens” still insist that the library should get rid of The Joy of Sex or whatever, they should be told politely but firmly that libraries are there to provide a variety of books to a variety of people and that if there’s anything in the library that they personally don’t want to read then they don’t need to read it. There are librarians who would cave under pressure and pull a controversial book, but this goes against the American Library Association’s Code of Ethics. Most of us are committed to “uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources”.
Well, I’m late to the party and I’m also at work. But I’ll talk a bit about donations–
We depend a lot on donations, actually. This library has very little money; we should be twice the size for our population (welcome to California county libraries!). We now get some money from the city as well, so we can stay open decent hours, but our book budget is almost non-existent (and CDs and DVDs are almost entirely donations). We accept a lot of donations, and we throw some away. We’re not interested in your old textbooks or your full run of National Geographic.
Anyway, we have this great club, the Friends of the Library. Most libraries have a club like this, full of nice elderly folks who do volunteer work. The donations really belong to them; they sort through the books, price them, and run the weekly book sale. We earn about $55K or more per year this way, and a lot of it goes right to our book budget. So, yes, as long as the book isn’t too disgusting or outdated to sell, we would like you to donate it. There is no cost associated with selling it, and sometimes we do put it in the collection.
We now have enough money that the librarian will almost always approve a purchase request, as long as it isn’t too obscure.
But we hardly ever weed our collection, actually–I’ve even seen Cherry Ames books in the children’s room! Weeding in a wealthier library would consist of going through a shelf and checking each book for popularity, datedness, and so on. If it hasn’t moved off the shelf in a couple of years, it’ll go unless it’s somehow important. If it’s a medical book that says bad mothers cause autism, out it goes. I remember the Baltimore library caused a stir when I was in library school by implementing a policy that a book had to go out 7 times per year to stay in the collection, which I thought was idiotic.
Ha, there’ve been a lot of posts in the time it took me to write my monster above.
Again, this is up to the individual library. Circulation figures are going to play an important role. If a book hasn’t been checked out for a long time – three years is a common period – it’s likely to be considered for removal. This does depend on what the book is about, though. A novel that no one’s read for years is very likely to be removed, but a non-fiction book might be kept around just in case someone needs it for research.
In my collection development class in library school I was taught that books should be considered for removal if they were “MUSTIE”:
Misleading (factually inaccurate)
Ugly (poor physical condition)
Superseded (there’s a better, more up-to-date book on the same subject available)
Trivial (content is of no literary or scholarly significance)
Irrelevant (to the needs of local patrons)
Elsewhere (readily available at another branch)
A book fitting one or more of these criteria might still be worth keeping in the library, but if shelf space needs to be freed up then some MUSTIE books are going to have to go.
*One reason I chose to go into academic librarianship is so I wouldn’t have to deal with people like this, but if this patron has identified a book that contains inaccurate or badly outdated information or is physically damaged then the library should remove/repair it.
I wouldn’t trust the judgment of the average community member as to factors STIE above, but if they’re concerned then the librarian should evaluate the book in question. If the patron’s only objection is that he doesn’t like the book, he doesn’t have a point. If he insists on bothering the librarians about this, it may end up being an issue that the board has to deal with.
Lamia’s library collection policy links are surprisingly entertaining. Kalona Public library, part of a city with a population of 2,300, many of Amish and Mennonite extraction, appears to have a less compromising no-censorship stance than that of Louisville, CO.
Louisville’s Challenged Materials policy follows:
Emphasis added.
Ok, say our fanatic wants a book moved from the children’s section to the adult section, and can arrange a public demonstration to back him up. Or say he agrees book banning is abhorrent, but that certain volumes (Judy Blume, Stephen King, the Bible) should be placed behind the counter. What then?
Such antics would probably just get a flat refusal. You can make a case for putting Playboy, anime magazines, and Nolo books behind the counter (anything that’s popular to steal or can only be sold to people over 18), but ‘behind the desk’ is not that large an area and it’s already pretty full. We have several shelves of Bibles, we’re not putting them behind the desk.
BTW, if you ever want an entertaining thread, ask librarians for their crazy stories. You’d be amazed at what people do in a library. There was this one time someone put a live duck into the bathroom at closing time…
Ok, but what about the more likely version of the same? Somebody wants Jennifer Has Two Daddies placed either in the adult section or behind the desk.
(For completeness, I see from Amazon that Jennifer’s two Daddies include her birth-Dad and her step-Dad. The 1983 book has nothing to do with homosexuality.)
FYI, there are posts on other forums indicating that at least some libraries and friends of libraries have rules about donations.
Talk to your local librarian or FOL before making a special trip to donate books.
During that conversation, make sure to determine the largest load you can bring.
I’m a small player in the used book trade, and I’ve got enough discards sitting around that if I take them all to the local library/Goodwill thrift/Salvation Army thrift at once I’ll get on someone’s nerves there.
Done it once or twice…
Not truly a direct response, but I believe you’re mixing up Daddy’s Roommate and Heather Has Two Mommies in that example.
I haven’t dealt directly with this issue, but moving items from the children’s to the adult section often seems to happen when the librarians and city/local council go head-to-head over citizen complaints…it’s a way of making it less likely for children to have access to some titles without caving in entirely.
I have never run into any library that puts things “behind the desk”, but I’m from an urban, liberal area.
