Committees Won't Be Selecting Branch Collections
Posted December 8, 2006
Plans have been called off to divert the majority of each branch's 2007
materials-buying funds to committees of librarians who were to begin
selecting most books for the county's libraries.
Rumors had surfaced in October
that plans were being devised for centralizing book selection.
In mid-November, Collection Development Librarian Lucelia Flood-Partridge
briefed small groups of branch managers on the plans for replacing the
current method of decentralized materials selection with a committee-driven
method of selecting most library materials.
At a December 7th meeting of all branch managers, Ms. Flood-Partridge
said that several key aspects of the centralized selection plan had been
dropped. For example, she said there would be no selection committees
created to choose which branches would receive which new book titles.
(Centralized selection of nonbook materials were not part of the
original plans for decentralizing materials selection.)
Flood-Partridge said the administration will proceed with plans to
re-institute the choosing of books from monthly lists supplied by the
library system's primary book vendor. However, all branch and Central
Library agency selectors will be working with identical copies of a single
list monthly list, rather than with different title lists for different
agencies.
For many selectors, this change in ordering procedures will be a return
to something they've done before. Selecting from vendor-produced title lists
was the method used at AFPL for many years until former board chair
William McClure - mistakenly believing that these lists somehow prevented
branches from ordering the materials they actually needed - had instructed
then-director Mary Kaye Hooker to eliminate vendor-produced title lists
from the book-selection process.
Flood-Partridge assured managers that branch selectors could add to their monthly orders whatever titles they
need that, for whatever reason, do not appear on the vendor-produced
title lists. She also promised that the vendor would be instructed to
include in its first list all the titles that the standard review journals
have reviewed since August 2006. (Due to the fact that library
administrators have not persuaded the county's purchasing office
to allow year-round ordering
for the county's libraries, for the past
several years branch staff have been forbidden to order materials for their
libraries' patrons between August 15th and, at the soonest, February of
the following year.)
Flood-Partridge also told managers that next year she would be routinely
notifying Branch Services Administrator Anne Haimes about which branch
managers fail to meet monthly spending targets for book purchases.
Continue reading previously-posted AFPLWATCH stories
|
.com