The library profession has worked on issues related to equity, diversity and inclusion for a long time, mostly from a workforce or a service perspective. However more recently extensive assessment of library collections has focused on diversity and inclusion. As a profession we are now working on providing metadata to make content accessible that focuses on diversity and inclusion, and we are also analyzing our collections to see how different perspectives are represented, whether through approval acquisition or through traditional firm ordering. Collection Management has already published many articles on diversity and inclusion and will continue to actively solicit papers that address these matters. In this issue we continue that discussion. Heidi Blackburn and Omer Farooq, in “LGBTQIA-R: Creating a Diverse and Inclusive Medical Collection at a Public Metropolitan University” wanted to create a more inclusive intersectional health and medical collection for their users. They found that not only was it imperative to include faculty with disciplinary knowledge in the selection process, but they also had to proactively search a wide variety of publishing venues, including monitoring small presses and looking for book reviews in journals that focused on LGBTQIA-R issues.
On another major topic related to collections, two articles focus on space and the logistics of having to move large parts of the physical collection out of the library. The RMIT University Library in Melbourne, Australia, used the lens and framework of logistics management to maintain a large part of their collection, temporarily housed off-site, as close to browsable as possible while conducting a major renovation of the library. Paul Mercieca, Sue Reynolds, Elsi Hooi and Tanya Bramley, in “Books in Transit: The Logistics of Library Book Movement,” covers the procedures and workflows they developed, and they found that understanding the principles of logistics, combined with the professional staff’s knowledge of collection use, enabled them to select appropriate collections for temporary storage and quickly make these available. In the second article, the University of Oklahoma had more than 2.9 million government documents in one of their main libraries, and after extensive analysis of collection use they decided to move the whole collection to off-site storage. In “The Leviathan: How to Move 2.9 Million Government Documents Offsite” Jeffrey Wilhite and Laura Heygood covers the planning, actual move and lessons learned – from learning from the literature to understanding where any wear and tear on buildings may happen as the move is actually conducted.
Collection use is the focus on the next three articles. Elizabeth Weisbrod, Adelia Grabowsky, Shirley Fan and Phillipe Gaillard hypothesized that they could use interlibrary loan statistics and possible journal turnaway reports to predict the future use of “big deal” journal packages for humanities, social science and science disciplines. While Grabowsky et al, found that ILL requests could predict future journal use for science and social science disciplines, it did not work for humanity disciplines. The methodology, results and discussion covered in “Journal Packages: Another Look at Predicting Use” will be very useful for libraries wanting to conduct a similar analysis. Navah Ansari and M. Raza used a different approach to see how well one of their big deal packages worked for their users. In “Awareness and Use of Emerald Insight Database as Determinant of Research Output for Research Scholar in Aligarh Muslim University, India,” they surveyed their users to measure levels of awareness of the database, how it was used, how satisfied they were with the product, and finally compared the results to actual use. The results were used to make renewal decisions. And in the third article, librarians at the University of Denver wanted to know if data from the library’s “Request It” service, a user initiated request to physical items picked up and made available at a service point, could be used to analyze which subjects and disciplines were more likely to need to browse the physical collations. The “Request It” service was first implemented during a library renovation where the whole collection was in off-site storage, but the service was retained once the renovations were completed and part of the collection returned to the library. The results, often surprising, highlights that it is easy to make assumptions that may not be completely accurate, and when making collection decisions librarians often have to manage what users say with what they actually do.
The final contribution to this issue, a “Tools of the Trade” contribution, evaluates whether data from another user-initiated service can be used for collection development. In “The Suggest a Library Purchase Program at the University of Colorado Boulder” Kathia Ibacache found that data from the library’s “Suggest a Library Purchase” could have the potential to identify collection gaps, but that subject specialists would need to analyze the data further and also promote the service more broadly to library users.
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA
[email protected]
Judith M. Nixon
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
[email protected]