The goals of collection development
Collection development in the Virginia Tech University Libraries serves several purposes. Much the most significant of these is to satisfy the university's current needs for information resources in any format which will support its primary missions of teaching, research, and service. Our collection-building efforts reflect as nearly as possible the programmatic goals of Virginia Tech.
Other goals shaping our collection development efforts are to build collections which will support in at least a basic way future university programs or areas of specialty; to furnish some basic support for the needs of the university's non-academic units; to provide some materials in nearly all areas of knowledge partly as a basis for users' self-education; and to serve as an information resource for other, primarily in-state, libraries with whom we enjoy partnerships.
Within the context of these goals, the two stars which guide our efforts are the academic relevance and the quality of the materials we seek to add to our collections.
Each statement in this compilation describes our goals for a given subject collection. Each statement begins with a description of the academic program being served by a given subject collection, and then moves on to describe our collecting goals along several dimensions including subject, language, age of materials, and format. Important information about how we collect materials in a given discipline or how those materials are used is given in subsequent sections of each statement. The appendices to this handbook cover an assortment of concerns which cut across disciplinary boundaries, including statements about various formats or kinds of publications, some of the gathering plans which automatically bring us materials matching certain specifications, and other miscellaneous concerns such as censorship or the treatment of gifts.
Our collection-building efforts are organized by discipline and rely on the work of subject experts. It only makes sense for this handbook to follow the same organizing principle. However, this should not obscure a central principle: we are building a collection, not a conglomerate of balkanized collections. This commitment to a global view of our collections (whose use we know empirically to be highly interdisciplinary) has many implications in practice. Budgets are negotiated on an annual basis among bibliographers who try to achieve a shared sense of how collections are being used and where current needs are greatest. New serial subscriptions are decided on collectively, and serials are not canceled without broad review. Bibliographers in related areas communicate to make sure that gaps between collections are avoided, and that subject collections are built so as to support use both by specialized insiders and by patrons from related disciplines.
The new technologies which are transforming collection development require that we take a particularly broad view of our work. It has been our experience that once a data base is acquired and made available for remote access, use comes from all over the university in ways which often cannot be predicted on a disciplinary basis. As we move aggressively to underwrite online access to a variety of data bases, it is necessary that our budgeting reflect a global view, as many such services require significant financial investments which ultimately cannot be attributed to single disciplines.
Our collection building enterprise does not take place in a vacuum. Even leaving aside national or state commitments, we operate first within a university context. Requests for materials from faculty or other users are always welcome, and we have set up a variety of mechanisms to make it easy to make requests. The great majority of requests for individual books are honored. Although we are not able to honor as high a percentage of requests for acquisitions in other formats, most videos are purchased as a consequence of faculty requests, and most of our serial subscriptions have somewhere in their history a faculty request. Serials are not ordinarily cancelled without a prior notification and call for comments to all departments. The interest and commentary of our user community is always welcome, and we encourage it.
We also build collections within a library context. Our significant investment in reference materials is heavily shaped by reference librarians. Decisions about new data bases are made in consultation with staff in reference and automation so that we can provide the most transparent and network accessible services possible with the fewest unique interfaces. Decisions about the purchase of materials or acceptance of gifts and about how materials should be treated physically or bibliographically are made in consultation with technical services staff and with an understanding that resources are finite.
Finally, our collection building efforts take place within the context of existing collections. Building to our strengths while filling in the gaps of our collections are in a sense opposite goals, but both at least deserve and receive attention. Increasingly the work of collection development involves the management of existing collections, and our staff spend significant time on decisions about retention, storage, discard, physical treatment, and bibliographic control of our holdings. These decisions are generally informed by the same philosophical perspectives towards future collections which this handbook articulates.
Everyone understands that the world of scholarly and scientific communication is undergoing a tumultuous change. Faculty and students alike expect to have current, authenticated, and easily manipulated information in textual, graphical, and audio-visual media available at their workstations. Sometimes these goals are compatible, and sometimes they are not. Publishers are undertaking radical programs which will in many cases bring information to users without the intermediation of libraries or other parties.
We find these changes exciting and are committed to making as many as possible of our resources available to our users from remote locations. We recognize that the delivery of modern information resources will require cooperation with other units on campus and that very often it will not be apparent to users whose work or whose dollars have made possible their successful research. We also recognize however that our resources will never be sufficient to acquire all the knowled5/16/06ms require.
The unique role, the added value, of academic librarians has always been to bring together an understanding of the publishing world and the resources it makes available with an understanding of the academic enterprise and the local institution, and then to acquire relevant materials and make them available in a cost-effective manner using the most powerful means available. The new technologies do not change this basic nexus of academic information, but rather help to extend our reach. They do not remove, although they do complicate in interesting ways, the basic philosophical issues we must encounter, and for that reason a handbook such as this is all the more necessary in a new information age.
The purpose of this manual is to describe and document the goals we seek to meet in collection development. For more detailed information about policies and procedures, readers are referred to the Virginia Tech University Libraries Bibliographer's Manual. Comments on this handbook are welcome at any time, and we would be glad to furnish any other information about collection development that our users may require.
Revised 10/2000
