How does one start a library? Do you buy one book, label it 500.00, stick it on the middle shelf, and go from there? (Okay, I know that the Dewey Decimal system has categories). Are there library brokers who know which books are banned for public schools in your area? Do publishers offer library package #27 in which you get a huge pile of books?
I’m not quite sure what you’re asking here. Is it a question about categorising books on shelves, or about deciding which books to buy in the first place? Are you talking about a personal library, or a circulating library?
Nowdays, unfortunately, there seem to be far more libraries closing than there are libraries opening (i live in Baltimore, a place where public library closures have become a way of life - all this in a place that calls itself “The City that Reads”. Pretty funny, huh?) so anyone looking to start a library might want be able to find a fire sale of books from a recently closed branch.
Buying a “library package #27” from an individual publiher probably wouldn’t give you a great collection - have you ever seen how many different publishers are represented in your typical library. Not to mention the fact that many publishing houses specialise in particular types of books, such as sci fi, thriller, scholarly humanities books, sciences etc. Most libraries have been around for a while and have built up their cllections over time. Some large libraries and university libraries were started with donations from wealthy people, who would sometimes leave monetary bequests or even their own personal libraries to an institution.
As for finding out what books are banned by your local schools, if they are public schools then their reading lists should be part of the public record, so you should be able to find out from the schol board in your area. Of course, in a country which claims to place so much faith in first amndment rights, there should be NO books that fall into this category.
michael.
First you get a librarian…
This is what they teach us to do in library schools. This is why librarians are supposed to have a masters degree. It’s realy not just three years of learning to put the labels on straight. We take a class called collection development, so we know how to create a library (which almost never happens) and manage the books once we have them.
So, supposing you had an empty room, and a pile of money, and wanted to start a library? You can go to book jobbers, (big distributors who give libraries a discout) and get a basic selection of current titles. I think Hawaii public libraries did this for a while, until they found out they were being ripped off. But you can blanket order everything on the best seller lists, fiction and non-fiction, and this will cover you for popular reading. Before this, you want to find out your library’s needs. Childrens Library needs are different from high school, from academic, from public, from special. I work in a nursing library, so I ask the instructors what kind of books they want, then split up the budget accordingly. Librarians also spend a lot of time reading book catalogs, and generally each librarian in a big library is given a section to keep current. They are the selector for that area. So if Marion Librarian is a mystery buff with an undergraduate major in biology, these are the areas she’s going to order for.
What you don’t do, if you want a good library, is stock it completely with donations from the public. The public gives libraries what they want to get rid of which is generally junk. One of my instructors told us about a high school library that tried to do this and ended up full of out of date encyclopedias and forty copies of “Profiles in Courage.” This was in the '60s and everyone gave that book as a Chrsitmas present.