How Successful Libraries Maintain Their Collection

Julie Heckert has her work cut out for her. She’s the Digital Services Librarian for Orem Public Library. Her library has one branch that serves a population of nearly 100,000 people of all ages and backgrounds. Building and maintaining a collection that serves the needs of that diverse population requires extra help. 

“Everyone deserves to be represented at the library,” says Julie. “So, it's really important that we pay attention ​and ​have a wide variety of books about different people ​in ​different circumstances.​ It's also very important that we provide opportunities for people to find books through their browsing that they may not automatically think of as a title that they want to check out.”  

Julie and her coworkers know that the most important thing a library staff member can remember is to use their tools. And they have a tool to help them build and maintain their collection.  

Core Collections is a digital database, updated in real time, which provides new and veteran collection development staff at all kinds of libraries (public, academic, and school!) with a centralized resource of authoritative recommendations that are vendor and publisher neutral. It really solves four big problems libraries face. 

1. Purchasing decisions are difficult to make. Each collection helps you discover, evaluation and select the titles to purchase. Library staff can search by Dewey Decimal ranges, Lexile levels, publication dates, grade level, and more. 
    
2. Budgets are tight. Every title in Core Collections is assigned a recommendation level: Essential, Recommended, Supplemental, or Weeded. That makes it easy to prioritize and spend your money wisely. 
    
3. Weeding is fun, but fraught with anxiety. It’s a lot of responsibility to decide which books get discarded. But libraries using Core Collections don’t have to fret over those decisions. The recommendation levels make it easy to justify which books leave the shelves. 
    
4. Different staff members with different skill levels contribute to building and maintaining the collection. Everyone on the staff can use Core Collections. You can create folders for a weeding projects, specific subject heads, or genres. The homepage is streamlined to highlight each recommendation level with larger icons, alongside search helpers designed to help staff save time on materials they are looking for. Search helpers rotate through a variety of trending searchers to help inspire new ways to search or navigate through areas you might not have considered like “Books for Reluctant Readers” or “Media Tie-ins.” 

As Mariam Addarratt, the Collection Development Manager at Lexington Public Library, states “We used Core Collection to build a folder with titles with a wide variety of subheadings to be sure we get an adequate amount of books. We were able to share the files and collaborate so that we are spending our funds wisely.”  

Core Collections consists of 7 collections, covering titles for all readers regardless of age or reading interest. Core Collection en Español is our latest addition. It serves all Spanish-speaking readers and has been a solution for many selectors struggling with navigating collection development for that area. Having the full Core Collections suite allows libraries to address all their collection development needs, from top to bottom and everything in between. Becky Walker, the director at Meherrin Regional Library, finds having all seven collections to be invaluable.  

 “Core Collections provides us a one stop resource to ensure our collection contains a broad range of essential and recommended titles,” she told me. “We review Core Collections in our selection process as well our weeding process. Core Collections helps us to identify titles that provide our community with quality content.”