I don't think I posted anything last week. At least not since very early in the week. My energy is starting to wane.
I've been working on putting together of collection development policy for the library. It's not necessarily a difficult project. I'm using the IFLA guidelines for a CDP, so I pretty much just follow those and add stuff in when necessarry. So it's not hard, but it's tedious. Which sort of makes it hard.
Last week I wrote a policy for the serials collection. That one wasn't quite so in depth, but it had the nice little bonus of putting sole responsibility for selecting periodicals in my hands. I'm not saying that I'm going to all out cancel the subscriptions that annoy me, but I am saying that the Conservative Chronicle may not be long for this world.
If I can find out usage statistics, and it turns out that the CC is read with some regularity, I'll keep it. After all, it's all about making the patrons happy. But in my professional opinion, it's not exactly a "scholarly" publication. It's pretty much just Ann Coulter-esque liberal bashing. With nativity scenes on the front page of the Christmas issue. If it gets read less than once an issue, I'm not wasting the library money on it. And I like knowing that the decision is mine to make.
That being said, I have no idea how to go about collecting usage statistics here!
Also, local update: I found a lovely wine bar in GB this weekend. I plan to patronize them frequently. Jim is not so thrilled with this idea.
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Does the circulation department do any type of "in-house use" recording for items they find laying around the library? if not, you might ask them to start, and if so, you could see if they do this for serials/periodicals as well. I'm assuming serials don't actually get checked out at your library, but that might not be the case.
ReplyDeleteTechnically nothing gets properly "checked-out" here. Hopefully people write down the titles they take back to their office or home, but even that seems to be rare. Since the library is not in a seperate room, but just a section of the main research area, I'm not sure how to improve circulation. I'll think on it.
ReplyDeleteBeing that I am the circulation department (and the reference department and the tech services department) I think I'll try to keep a list of all the materials I find laying around. I also may designate a space for people to put serials after they've used them, allowing me to reshelve, but I don't know whether that would actually be used. I'll work on it :)
I read this and thought of you!
ReplyDeletehttp://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2009/a-look-at-librarianship-through-the-lens-of-an-academic-library-serials-review/
Thanks, that was a seriously overwhelming thing to read, but really helpful. I dug out a few really nice links as well.
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