It’s been 6 months since we circulated the non-continuing resource purchasing guidelines for 2016.
We thought it would be good to review these and evaluate how well the guidelines are working out in practice. Comments on your experience and observations are most welcome.
I would appreciate any feedback to me (or in the form of comments on this post) by 31st August 2016.
“Needs must,” but I don’t believe the situation is beneficial in the medium to long term. The guidelines have succeeded in suppressing expenditure on books, but are not ideal in “developing a well-balanced undergraduate and research collection” (mission statement).
• The ‘pain’ is falling unevenly: little ‘pain’ for disciplines largely dependent on non-monographic literature (e.g. Chemistry); greater ‘pain’ for disciplines with more even mono/serial literature (e.g. Mathematics)
• Some disciplines need encouragement to make recommendations at the best of times; for these the guidelines have served to bring recommendations almost to a halt
• Some books unconnected with current teaching/research are nonetheless important to the intellectual life of a university community, e.g. social impact of science and science-related policy; award-winning ‘academic’ books
• The restrictions of the guidelines encourage academic staff to buy for their own collections rather than recommend to the Library, which is a shared resource for the UC community as a whole
• There are inefficiencies in the back-and-forth that can arise between Library staff and the LLO/academic to obtain justifications for purchase
• Re “Short term ebook loan:” Even current students often prefer print over electronic format for texts (I had a recent phone call from an Engineering academic noting this, and he expressed his own mild surprise that this obtains for ‘Generation Z.’)
I am still uncomfortable with the overall message we are handing out that we are a library that doesn’t buy books. I think we need to put forward a positive message about our role.
I am not personally aware of any book requests in my area
( science and engineering) that don’t have long term uses.
I am worried that we are putting faculties off using the library. AJ
I endorse John and Alison’s comments – some excellent points made there, eg. as John says, “Some books unconnected with current teaching/research are nonetheless important to the intellectual life of a university community”. We used to use the well-established academic book reviewing system in journals, Choice, etc. to decide what needed to be bought, and were able to lend our professional credibility to making those recommendations. Both academics and liaison librarians were responsible for continuing to develop the library collection in each taught discipline as necessary. That worthy system has largely gone out the window as the ‘just-in-time’ model has officially replaced ‘just-in-case’. However a number of us, liaisons as well as academics, remain uncomfortable with this development – is that because we are simply old fuddy-duddies and past our use-by date, or are there some valid concerns that refuse to go away? Any university library worthy of the name ought to be keeping up with new thought or research in its identified subjects, but we seem to have abdicated that responsibility as we try to carve out a new and smarter niche in the Brave New World. Ultimately too ‘smart’ for our own good, perhaps?
Max