Search results

“Public librarians are not interested in collection development issues.”

This essay is offered as advice to those who contemplate becoming or have recently become bibliographers. I begin with the admonition that neither users' studies, statistical analyses, nor approval plans compensate for a lack of knowledge of disciplinary research interests and bibliographic structure. In the final analysis, the best bibliographers are scholars. They keep current with a discipline's investigations and monitor its evolution. Even if they are unable to engage in detailed discourse on the more esoteric subjects its practitioners study, they understand its topography. That is, they possess a “feel” for what students in a given field find interesting, they understand its epistemology, know its publication trends and favored formats, and have a fine reference librarian's ability to use its bibliographic apparatus.

Academic librarians are being bombarded with an accelerating stream of news: new services, new public relations, new information formats, new technologies and new catalogs have been introduced during the past 10 to 15 years. Innovations are not always successfully assimilated by large academic libraries and dislocations associated with change in one department often affect the entire library. Coping strategies have been envisioned and even implemented, but usually are grafted onto existing, traditional organizational structures. Therefore, collection development and management in academic libraries is most sensibly addressed in terms of the larger library organization.

Corporate culture is a spirit formed by the shared values of the individuals in the organization that has potential to make the library more than the sum of its parts, both positively and negatively. It is the vehicle by which the organization defines itself, for both itself and the clientele, with the purpose of providing the best service possible by sharing a vision of the organization as an organic whole. It operates through the power of peer influence rather than direct vertical authority. This paper takes a holistic approach to a concept that is more complex than it first appears; it addresses the molding of corporate culture, not as a management function, but as a complex and deep system, being in effect the soul of the organization, which resides in the motivation of each individual and which, therefore, requires a special kind of leadership.

In The International Dictionary of Sports and Games, “sport” and “game” have the follow‐ing definitions:

This paper situates the concept of library as place in its broader context of relevant theory and research in a number of fields, primarily psychology, neurology, geography, philosophy, and architecture. The term “place” is defined, its powers described, and its role in library administration and design thus revealed to be one of very considerable significance at the highest levels of library mission in any setting.

The definition of the collection employed in this essay accounts for it as an assemblage of information sources made accessible systematically in any format by the library or information center for the purposes of the community that is to intended to serve.

Among many unflattering characterizations of librarians is the one that accuses us of wishing to keep our collections neat, clean and in proper order on the shelves. That is, not being used. This is a half‐true, if exaggerated, statement. As rational professionals, librarians realize that if a collection is well used it is not always in order and available, or else the collection is not as good as it should be. Control—knowing where an item is, who has it—is the goal librarians strive to achieve, rather than maintaining every item in its place.

Towards the middle of The Name of the Rose Adso of Melk realizes that “not infrequently books speak of books.… In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries‐old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.” With these thoughts in mind Adso asks his mentor William of Baskerville “what is the use of hiding books, if from the books not hidden you can arrive at the concealed ones?” William replies that “over the centuries it is no use at all. In a space of years or days it has some use.…” To which Adso, dumbfounded, asks “and is a library, then, an instrument not for distributing truth but for delaying its appearance?”