Number 10, September 1994
Oberlin College is justifiably proud of its library collections, which contain approximately 1.7 million items in all formats--books, bound journals, government documents, scores, recordings, microforms, and video resources. The size of the Library's collections places Oberlin in the uppermost ranks of the nation's college libraries. Who builds these collections and how are decisions made concerning what items to acquire?
Collection development at Oberlin is a collaborative effort involving librarians, faculty members, and students. Each academic department and program is assigned a librarian who functions in a liaison role providing communication between the department and the Library. The librarians working in this role have primary assignments elsewhere in the Library, perhaps in reference or cataloging, for example. Their collection development responsibilities include directing to departments information needed for selection decisions (such as publishers catalogs and new book announcements), receiving recommendations for purchase, and insuring that needs are met and the budget expended in a timely fashion.
The percentage of selection done by faculty members on the one hand and librarians on the other varies by discipline. In the sciences, for example, faculty do most of the book selection, with the Science Librarian facilitating their work by providing them with selection resources. In the Art Department, both the Art Librarian and the faculty select materials for the collection. The same is true in Russian language and literature, where the liaison librarian has been active with the faculty in selecting materials for the collection. The key to the success of this enterprise is collaboration between the faculty and librarians. There is simply no substitute for the subject expertise of individual faculty members. Similarly, the bibliographic expertise of the Library staff insures that once materials have been selected they will be ordered, received, cataloged, and processed quickly and accurately.
Students too play an important role in the collection development enterprise. Students are encouraged by the Library staff to submit requests for materials in all formats. Sometimes these student requests provide a clue to unmet needs or the first indication of research projects just getting underway. While the Library cannot promise that every student (or faculty) request will result in an immediate authorization for purchase, certainly the majority of student requests do result in orders being placed.
Overseeing and coordinating the collection development activities of librarians, faculty members, and students is the Collection Development Librarian, Eric Carpenter. In addition to providing liaison with the English Department (his area of subject specialty), Eric is particularly active in monitoring interdisciplinary subjects in the humanities and social sciences--areas that might not attract the sustained attention of single departments but in which a selection of scholarly writings is crucial for current and future work by Oberlin faculty and students.
Not even the largest academic libraries can acquire all currently published scholarship. The art of collection development is to understand the curriculum, the research and teaching needs of the faculty, and the interests of students so well that librarians and faculty can select from the universe of publications that subset of scholarship needed most immediately to support and nourish the intellectual life of the College.
Given the necessity to match collection development time and dollars to very specific needs, it stands to reason that most selection work involves sifting through sometimes large lists of new publications and discriminating on a title-by-title basis what is most needed at Oberlin. Ninety percent of the Library's collection development work proceeds in this way. There are other ways, of course, to bring new materials into the collections. One of the most beneficial is to work closely with reputable library vendors so that they supply the Library with, for example, all the new works of certain authors whom we have decided ought to be collected comprehensively. Such an author-based collecting profile has been drawn up by the Department of Romance Languages for Francophone Africa. Similar plans may soon be put in place for other subject areas, such as German and Russian, where, for specified authors, their poetry, short stories, novels, and plays will arrive regularly without our having to order each title individually. The Conservatory Library acquires much of its twentieth-century scores collection in just this way. Such "approval plans" save the time of librarians and faculty members by allowing items of known need to arrive automatically.
In all of the Library's collection development work, written collection development policy statements for each department and program provide guidance to faculty and librarians alike, specifying at which of five levels Oberlin will collect various subdisciplines, chronological periods, formats, and languages. These levels range from a minimal level to the comprehensive level. In the area of physical education, for example, Oberlin no longer offers a major, the department having been reorganized into athletics and physical education. Minimal collection support is sufficient in such an area. The second level of support is conceptualized as a "basic information level," an example for Oberlin being our collection of world travel guides--not extensive, but up-to-date and adequate to provide basic information for the travel of students and faculty. By far the most common level of collecting at Oberlin is a third level entitled "study or instructional support." Such collecting is aimed at supporting a discipline in a systematic way but at a level less than research intensity. Collecting at the research level, the fourth level of collecting, is pursued sparingly at Oberlin, though there are some areas in which our collecting attempts research coverage. Nineteenth-century American history is supported at this level, building on existing strengths in nineteenth-century American periodicals and Abolitionist materials. In the Conservatory Library, the collected critical editions of individual composers are collected at a research level, the texts represented by these editions supporting both performance activities as well as historical and theoretical inquiry. Oberlin's collection development policies, which have just recently been completed, provide invaluable guidance in the overall enterprise of shaping responsive, focused library collections.
Collection development work is at the heart of the Library's mission. The collections are a community resource and their development is a community responsibility requiring a stable and predictable level of funding and an institution-wide commitment to the systematic and continuous work of selecting from a universe of information those materials that will support the intellectual life of Oberlin College.
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Last updated: 13 Sept. 1994