Library Camp @ Syracuse, part 5

Ellen Reynolds, from the Pioneer Library System, is out afternoon keynote speaker. Her topic is “Does Your Collection Need Analysis?” Upfront she mentioned Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science.

Collection management basics:

• Analyze
• Evaluate
• Plan
• Fund
• Build
• Organize
• Access
• Market

What are the collection numbers (received from ILS reports)?

• Number of items in the collection
• Percentage of an area (970s) of the total collection (adult non-fiction)
• Circulation for the area
• Percentage the area circulation represents of the total circulation area
• Average age (of the collection)
  
• Average circulation
• Turnover rate
• Median age (of the collection)
  
• Median circulation
• Percentage of collection in circulation on a given day
• Percentage of collection that hasn’t circulated

What are we looking for?

• Holes in the collection
• Things that have gone missing
• Is it missing? Misplaced? Stolen?
• Strengths
• Weaknesses – missed purchases
• Titles to weed
• Primary reason for doing this analysis
  
• Titles to update
• Lost treasures
• Could be books on the bottom shelf that no one bends down to look at.

Basic information t begin with:

• Call number
• Item type
• Age level
• Genre
• Number of circulations
• Date of last circulations
• Publication date

Turnover rate is how often a book is used each year. The turnover rate differs by collection. Picture books, for example, should circulate more frequently than history books in a public library. Circulation rate will also differ by type of library.

Collection analysis can be used for budget planning. Budget projections include many calculations...what stands out is understanding what the collection should entail and then the cost of creating that collection (as well as how long it will take to build that collection).

Can you increase circulation and turnover, while decreasing the size of the collection and decreasing the age of the collection? Yes! She is showing us a chart from Sodus Free Library that demonstrates that.

When looking at specific books, Ellen also tells libraries to evaluate these things for a specific title:

M - Misleading
U - Ugly
S - Superseded
T - Trivial
I - Irrelevant
E - (Available) Elsewhere

The process that Ellen goes through with libraries is not haphazard. Some libraries may not be happy with the results and she is okay with the fact that some libraries will not weed as fully as she recommends.

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