Article draft
*Note: this is my first draft (and the conclusion is not actually done) of a proposed article on web 2.0 practice in real collection development/acquisitions work. Comments and feedback are welcome!
Integrating Web 2.0 into Collection
Development Practice:
Using LibraryThing as a gift management tool
Introduction
The library profession is inundated by articles, websites and blogs which
remind librarians to incorporate more Web 2.0 tools and techniques in order to
attract and keep users. Library instruction,
reference, and web services departments have been writing about and trying to
put web 2.0 principles into practice for several years. But what about collection development and acquisitions
work? Steven R. Harris at The University
of New Mexico writes a blog “Collections
2.0” and he articulates the idea of “collecting or collections 2.0”
principles into practice in collection development work:
“Collecting: Obviously,
the manner in which library materials are acquired. This may seem like old wine
in new bottles, but my primary notion here is that the collections are patron
driven. But more than just that, the patron … can get what they want in the
most unmediated way. It happens quickly and without a lot of rigmarole. Not even filling out requests. Just
“click”…got it…
Collections: Main idea here is that
collections behave in a 2.0
way. Reuse, repackage, mashup, user-centric, save, manipulate, interactive. And
that patrons … can talk back to the collection (and to the library/librarian)
and talk with other patrons … about their experiences and interests.
Two things there about the collections 2.0 mantra, but they have very different
implications.”
Our library struggles with this dilemma of actually putting the principles into practice. It is one thing to offer patrons web 2.0 tools on our websites and in our services, but how do we do it in our acquisitions and collection development work? What are practical and useful ways to update our traditional services? How do we actually do either collecting or collections 2.0 work? This articles attempts to identify and explain how we put Collections 2.0 principles into practice in our library.
One of the most challenging and time consuming services we provide in collection development and acquisitions is the gifts and donations program. Some libraries view it as a curse; others see it as a boon to stretch inadequate resources. All libraries can agree that a gifts program is a lot of work. SUNY Geneseo’s Milne Library is no different. A public liberal arts college which is part of the State University system in the Genesee Valley region of upstate New York, Geneseo struggles with flat or decreasing budgets, fluctuating serials and database costs and cuts to its monograph allocations. Faced with a rapidly aging collection, decrease in spending on recent publications, weeding of the collection is at an all-time high. Seeing the need for a different approach, our solicitation and acceptance of gifts and donations is increasing as well. How do we use gifts and donations to enhance our collection and our budget, while putting collections 2.0 principles into practice?
The Old Way (How we used to do it)
Libraries have struggled for years with the management of their gifts and
donations programs. The old way of
entering each title, author, publisher and date into a spreadsheet, writing an
acknowledgment, making decisions about keeping or discarding is cumbersome and
time consuming. Manually entering all
the book title information is labor-intensive.
Depending upon the amount of materials and staff involved, many
libraries choose to only work with their gifts and donations during “slow”
times of the year. Many libraries turn
away gifts, or actively discourage donations to their collections. Dependent upon subject specialists’
expertise, many gifts sit waiting on shelves, waiting until the librarians can
find time to get around to inspecting the materials for addition to the
collection. At Geneseo, gifts and
donations were never actively solicited, but accepted with the understanding
that it might be some time before the materials actually made their way into
the collections. Patrons who generously
donated materials received an acknowledgment, but their participation ended
there, never knowing what became of the materials they donated to our library.
The New Way (how we
are doing it now)
So, how do we streamline the gifts management process and incorporate web
2.0 tools to increase our visibility and participation from community? Enter LibraryThing. Remember, collections 2.0 is not just about
the tools, but how users can participate in and actively contribute to the
remaking of the library collection. LibraryThing,
founded in 2005 by Tim Spalding is a social cataloging web application,
designed to create and share library catalogs with other users on the web. Used by individuals and organizations to
catalog their books and share tags with other users, it is a unique community
of users designed around sharing and editing metadata about books. It is also an example of one way we implemented
web 2.0 principles into collection development practice at SUNY Geneseo, so as to
increase awareness of our gifts and donations.
LibraryThing helps:
1. Many of the books can already be found in LibraryThing because bibliographic data is imported from Amazon and Library of Congress. No need to add each individual title unless it is not already in the catalog.
2. Tagging each gift book with a unique identifier to identify the gift should be done with confidentiality provisions in mind, but allows for the donation to be identified by the name if they so desire.
3. Users can participate – making the gift collection available to the general public can be done as easy as creating an RSS feed for the catalog. Subject specialists can then look “virtually” at each gift title and tag books they want to keep or get rid of.
4. Our library patrons can become involved as well – again, using the same principles as above, the community can be invited to participate and comment on books, by adding reviews, tags and editing the content.
5. Using the new feature of “Collections” in LibraryThing, libraries can differentiate gift materials from anonymous donations, special collections, or added to the collection. Its all up to the librarian, the users and the public.
6. LibraryThing allows you to print your catalog – an easy way to create lists of materials for users who want documentation of their library gift.
The benefits to this practice are enormous. Clerical staff and student workers can be easily trained to enter materials into the LibraryThing web interface, which is extremely intuitive. A simple search box serves as the first step for entering title, author or simply the ISBN. Automatically, LibraryThing searches your preferred source of data. For our library, we choose to use Amazon as our default data source but users can choose from over 690 other sources all over the world. Once a book is entered and selected, the user can tag the book. At our library, we choose to tag the items with a unique identifier that indicates to our staff how we obtained the book, whether it was anonymous or by a particular user. One thing to keep in mind is the confidentiality of your patron. Always ask upfront if the patron wants his or her name attached to the collection and that information made public. We tag the donated items with the patron’s initials and put them into a collection folder available in LibraryThing. For anonymously donated items, they go into two collections: Donated and Anonymous. Items which go into our library collection are ultimately labeled “Milne Library Circulating Collection”. Before adding to the collection, we will be notifying subject librarians of collections and titles of interest to the collection and asking for decisions to be made via LibraryThing, such as tagging items “keep” or “send to BWB” to indicate removal to Better World Books.
The Future Way? (conclusion,
or how we will do it in the future)
So how will our library meet the future challenges of putting web 2.0
principles into practice? By thinking
about it in the terms of web 2.0 principles rather than the tools. Tim O’Reilly wrote about web 2.0 “core
competencies” in a 2005 article:
1.
The web as platform.
2.
Harnessing
collective intelligence.
3.
Data is
the next Intel Inside.
4.
End of
the software release cycle.
5.
Lightweight
programming models.
6.
Software
above the level of a single device.
7.
Rich user
experiences.
So how do libraries use these principles in practice?
Works Cited
Harris, Steven R. Collecting & Collections
2.0. December 11, 2008.
http://collections2point0.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/collecting-collections-20/
(accessed June 2009).
LibraryThing |
Catalog your books online. August
29, 2005. http://www.librarything.com/ (accessed July 2, 2009).
O'Reilly, Tim. What
is Web 2.0? September 30, 2005.
http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html (accessed July 2, 2009).
Wikipedia. LibraryThing.
June 9, 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibraryThing (accessed July 2,
2009).
