Collection Development and Management for 21st Century Library Collections
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15
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Average rating3
Packed with discussion questions, activities, suggested additional references, selected readings, and many other features that speak directly to students and library professionals, Gregory’s Collection Development and Management for 21st Century Library Collections is a comprehensive handbook that also shares myriad insightful ideas and approaches valuable to experienced practitioners. This new second edition brings an already stellar text fully up to date, presenting top-to-bottom coverage of the impact of new technologies and developments on the discipline, including discussion of e-books, open access, globalization, self-publishing, and other trends; needs assessment, policies, and selection sources and processes; budgeting and fiscal management; collection assessment and evaluation; weeding, with special attention paid to electronic materials; collaborative collection development and resource sharing; marketing and outreach; self-censorship as a component of intellectual freedom, professional ethics, and other legal issues; diversity and ADA issues; preservation; and the future of the field. Additional features include updated vendor lists, samples of a needs assessment report, a collection development policy, an approval plan, and an electronic materials license.
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The bones of this book are good, but the material dates itself pretty quickly. There's a number of references to websites, plan providers, and other specific resources that either no longer exist or no longer provide the resource indicated.
All that said, the very basics of collection development are discussed here, but I stress the point that every library is different. No book can tell you what your specific population will be interested in, so it's important that you know your own patron base and what's popular with them.
I will say there's plenty of further reading resources provided within this book, though. So, for all that it's kind of flawed as a resource guide, there's tons of cited papers and books that will help fill in the gaps and satisfy additional questions you might have when reading this.
