Proactive Collection Development for Today’s Public Library

1. Proactive Collection Development for Today’s Public Library PaLA Conference, October 2016 Wendy Bartlett, CCPL

2. The best defense is a GREAT offense! Deliver great collections BEFORE your internal and external customers ask for it: Formats/Titles/Quantities Immediacy Irresistibility Readers’ Advisory expertise/tools Local Authors Collection Integrity Weeding

4. Proactive—have what they want before they know they want it • Put your orders in the catalogue 365 days in advance. Yes. A year. • Is it a fiscal issue, an audit issue for the Commonwealth, or the preference of your Finance Dept.? • Patrons come first—work with your Finance Dept.

5. HT select that far in advance • Cancel your standing orders, or schedule maintenance on them quarterly. • Select by publisher; search, sort by popularity. Beat your vendor carts! • If can’t drop in the catalogue, what CAN you do to let patrons know what’s coming?

6. Stay in the driver’s seat with Patron Driven Acquisition • Satisfy patron driven demand without hurting collection integrity—what’s wrong with dropping records in the CAT and seeing if they catch holds? PLENTY! • Avoid vendor “helpfulness” that leads to vendor’s deciding what’s in your catalogue. That is an extremely slippery slope! • “Patron Driven Acquisitions” ≠ “Buy Anything They Want” • Is there a particular genre or two that is heavily requested? Can it be handled another way?

7. Three levels of weeding for Adult and Kids --Have a long term strategy that accounts for balance in your collection --You are really dealing with three collections inside of your larger one. Each one has different weeding needs, so approach them differently. Frontlist Midlist Backlist

8. Frontlist—the Pikes Peak “age and number” method • More than a year old but less than 2 years = 28 copies with a status of Check Shelf. • More than 2 years old but less than 3 years = 14 system copies with a status of Check Shelf. • More than 3 years old but less than 5 years = 8 copies with a status of Check Shelf. • Over 5 years old = 4 system copies with a status of Check Shelf. The numbers don’t matter—the systematic, system-wide approach is what counts!

9. Midlist and Backlist Weeding --Midlist—reverse your weeding report. Don’t look for low circ. Look for high circ. Keep those, toss the rest. Don’t overthink series. Create a series list, follow it, and review once a year --Backlist---think classics, perennially summer reading titles, great series starters. These can all be helped by creating a Core List. (See next slide.)

10. Build a Reasonable Core Collection: again, three levels • Say “no” a lot. Every staffer with a favorite author, or a yen for yesteryear, is going to have a different idea of what goes on the core list. Include: • Classics (that people still read), • Popular series starters—Louise Penny, Michael Connelly. • BIG authors—Patterson, King—but only their true “hits” like Along Came a Spider • Hard to obtain items—local history, genealogy, and/or The Polka Hall of Fame!

11. Core Collection 101 • Selectors pick ten titles per month for one year. That’s your baseline. • Start with Classics. Yes, the others are important, but it’s easier to learn on this classics, and easier to explain to internal and external customers. • Mark the 590 field “CORE COLLECTION” when cataloguing these titles. Think hard before making it searchable by staff and patrons. Really hard. • Set minimum quantities to be owned in the collection. • Run reports to satisfy; eliminate from weeding reports if possible.

12. Local Self-Published Authors Make them happy without messing up your collection; standardize it to save your sanity! • Each branch has a half shelf dedicated to local authors. • Accept ONE donated copy of each title. • Put the directions on your website: http://www.cuyahogalibrary.org/getmedia/0ba32d94-52f3-4b1a-8d9b-f20d1784f9be/WritersCenterDonatedWork.pdf.aspx • Set limits on who is a local author. • Give it a very brief CAT record.

13. Take Field Trips! Here’s the kinds of things we ask. • How can we improve our internal customer service for you? • Playaways are being fazed out for Adults. This is the last year for Adult, and we’re only buying Bestsellers. Next year will likely be our last year to purchase Playaways for Youth and Teen, as the format is just not holding up. Will this be an issue for your customers? • Music CDs lost 16% of their circulation last year. In response to that, we’re buying far fewer titles and have raised the ratio to 10:1 to preserve what resources we do have. If you had ONE genre to keep what would that be? • Other questions for us?

14. Work in the branches • Talk to your patrons. Are they finding what they want? What would they like to see? • Staff are great, but the customers are your ultimate boss. What is it they’re looking for ? • Celebrate the diversity of your branches. It’s supposed to be hard; don’t be discouraged if there are hugely competing demands!

15. Notes

16. Bibliography • Chant, Ian. “The Art of Weeding.” Library Journal, 15 June, 2015, Vol. 140 Issue 11, p. 34-37. • Landgraf, Greg. “Solving the Self-Published Puzzle.” American Libraries, 30 October, 2015. • Mickelsen, Anna. “Practice Makes Perfect.” Library Journal, 1 September, 2016, Vol. 141, Issue 14, p. 34-36. • Vnuk, Rebecca. “Weeding without Worry.” American Libraries, 2 May, 2016.

17. Contact Information wbartlett@cuyahogalibrary.org Follow me on Twitter: @CCPL_WendyB