Collection Development and Collection Management

The Libraries at the University of St. Thomas have worked to build collections of resources which appropriately meet the curriculum related needs of the students and faculty.   Our mission statement and collection development goals emphasize our desire to provide the materials that will "support the curriculum and the intellectual development of St. Thomas students, faculty and staff."

Collection development refers to the process by which libraries create the collections of resources which we offer to our users.  We include books and periodicals, print and electronic resources in our discussions of library collections.  Increasingly, we use the term "collection management" for this activity, as we seek to balance the print and digital, owned and accessed information that our users require.

Recently, we have considered some questions in an attempt to redesign the collection development process:

• How should we allocate the materials budget between departments?
• How should we balance the allocation between books, periodicals and electronic resources
• How can we identify areas where the libraries resources need to be strengthened, and which areas of the collections are underused?
• How can the libraries' materials budget be expended more systematically?

Over the past several years, we have been trying to answer these questions using data that we have gathered about the collection itself, how it is used, the expectations of faculty for the use of the library, and so forth.   This data-gathering process included the analysis of bibliographies from student papers in which we identified the subjects represented in the cited materials, the balance between books and journals used, whether they were coming from our collection or were requested from other libraries, and the mix between print and electronic resources cited.

We have also engaged in discussions with faculty about their expectations for library use by their students and our own observations about the ways their students use the library.

Finally, we want to consider the needs of distance education programs and the reliance that libraries have on cooperative and consortial collection development.

We have realized that "collection development" which seems to suggest the creation of a rather static structure is now being replaced by the concept of collection "management," a recognition that library resources are dynamic and require regular assessment and adjustment.

The goals of this process have been to understand more clearly the role our libraries play in the educational process; to determine how well we are meeting our larger goal of supporting the curriculum at St.Thomas; to reach a consensus on the appropriate mix of materials in our collections; and to design a collaborative materials selection process which involves both faculty and librarians.

In addition to looking at the ways that library materials are used, we have reviewed the selection and acquisition processes, in an effort to insure that materials are ordered which fully meet the needs of students and faculty.  The old system was based on allocations of the library budget by academic departments.

We have implemented a new system which takes into account the interdisciplinary nature of many of the libraries' materials.  This new approach increases the involvement of librarians in the selection and ordering process, while insuring that faculty requests continue to be a critical source for new material suggestions.

The key feature of this new approach to collection development is five library round tables organized in major divisional areas: Business (BLRT), Social Sciences (SSLRT), Humanities and Arts (HART), Science and Technology (SATLRT), and Reference (REFRT.)  The librarians who work with departments in these areas (liaison librarians) meet regularly to review requests from faculty and to initiate their own requests, based on review tools that are appropriate to their disciplines.

In addition, librarians have day-to-day interaction with library users, which informs our understanding of the materials needed for research.

This approach reflects our understanding of the libraries' collections as intended to be used by students and faculty for course related projects and scholarship; it takes advantage of the broad perspective of librarians, which is based on direct knowledge of the ways that the collection is used by all types of students on a day-to-day basis; and it evens out the fluctuations in the ordering process.

We believe that it is very important for us to be thinking about these aspects of collection development at this time. In a time of transformational change in the world of information resources,

• we are trying to make the libraries' collections appropriately balanced between print and electronic, books and journals by subject 
• we are interested in understanding better the ways our collections are used and how they support the curricular goals of the university
• we want to insure that allocating the budget to various disciplines takes into account the technological and consortial environment in which we work

This way of thinking about the selection, acquisition and use of library resources is an important part of the libraries' effort to assess their effectiveness in the educational process.

Like many organizations at the beginning of the twenty-first century, libraries are engaged in self evaluation and are anxious to demonstrate the ways we support the teaching and learning at our institutions.

September 30, 1999; rev. June 2000; rev. August 2006
Linda Hulbert lahulbert@stthomas.edu