First published in 2004, this updated third edition aims to be both a comprehensive guide to collection development and management practices for students and a reference book for practitioners. The author, Peggy Johnson, is an adjunct professor in the MLIS programme at St Catherine's University in Minnesota, a former university librarian and a past president of the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services. Her expertise and experience are evident throughout this work that serves as a solid and comprehensive introduction to the world of collection services in libraries.
This edition of the guide attempts to make content relevant beyond the emphasis on academic libraries of the earlier editions by including sections applying content to public, school and special libraries. A particular strength is the coverage of collection issues that regularly arise in libraries – for example, discussion of ethics in dealing with vendors, digital rights management issues and also issues around censorship and selection. There are also short case studies at the end of each chapter to demonstrate practical applications of concepts.
The work begins by defining collection development and collection management in terms of the major functions and also giving some historical context, albeit with a strong North American focus. The discussion then moves to organisational models, responsibilities, skills and competencies. This section is highly useful for practitioners who need to develop duty statements and organisational structures. The six following chapters focus on topics such as planning policies and managing budgets, the principles of selection, including tools and resources, evaluation criteria, e-books, licensing issues, weeding collections, storage issues, copyright issues, digitisation, marketing, cooperative collection development and management, the evaluation and assessment of collections and business continuity planning.
The final chapter focuses on scholarly communication. New to the second edition, this chapter is expanded in this third edition. The appendices include a comprehensive glossary of terms, extensive references and selected reading lists for further study, detailed resource lists to aid librarians in tasks such as selection and sample policy statements, and an excellent index.
While this book has many merits, there are some limitations. First, the content is very North American in focus, so that some features such as selection tools are not as useful in the Australasian context. Also, while the author acknowledges that technology has reshaped collection development and management in recent years, the impact of some technological changes could be better covered. For example, marketing tools using social media rate less than a page and are prefaced with the comment that ‘research into the success of social media is sketchy and inconsistent’.
While acknowledging the limitations, this book serves its purpose as a comprehensive guide to collection development and management and is recommended to students and practitioners on that basis.