I was once enrolled in the library science program at Southern Connecticut State University. I wanted to leave my dead-end, low-paying job and becoming a librarian seemed like just the ticket. Not only would I have made more money, but I would have been surrounded by books. Heaven! But the ultimate fate of public libraries was very much an issue at the time. The Internet was changing everything and librarians were scared. It seemed to me that they spent more time etching their epitaphs than looking for ways to avoid their demise. I didn’t want to join a field that was thinning, if not actually disappearing, so I quit the program. Along the way, though, I picked up a thing or two, including some information about how libraries develop their collections.
I had always thought that the goal of a library was to own as many books as possible. Tons and tons of books. Maybe even all the books in the world! I was wrong. Your average public library is not trying to build the biggest collection. Instead, they aim to create a collection that will suit just about every need and taste without spending too much money or exceeding their storage capacity. They have to constantly prune the collections, making room for new acquisitions by dumping the books that aren’t popular.
Obviously I need to do the same thing, just on a smaller scale. To get it right, I need a set of guiding principles. That’s the hard part. The only way for me to create a set of guiding principles is by answering the questions from my previous post, one at a time.