The Future of School Library Collections

Laudato, Maricar

Stephens, W. (2014). Checking out tomorrow's school library collections. Young Adult Library Services. 18-20.

Summary

In this article, Wendy Stephens talks to school librarians about the current and future directions as to what the ideal school library collection should look like. Stephens observes that most school libraries are seeing a decrease in their nonfiction and reference print collection due to an increase in subscription to online databases. While there was a definite trend in the overall decrease in print resources, the seemed to be an increase in the amount of print books in the fiction collection. Stephens also discusses the increasing role that Common Core State Standards is playing in how school library collections are being developed, even if the school is not a common core school. Stephens relates that since the overall climate is leaning towards adopting Common Core across the nation, school libraries would do well to take heed of these standards when planning the collection.

Evaluation

For the most part, I agree with Stephens’ observations on school library collections because I have seen it mirrored in the school library I work at. When I started working at the school library 5 years ago, our collection consisted of over 30,000 print materials. Now, after extensive weeding projects to prepare for the renovation last summer, our collection has been trimmed to a lean 9000 print resources. And we don’t miss those sources at all; we got rid of a lot of the “fat” from our collection. Any information lost has been supplanted by superior updated information by the databases we have subscribed to since I got hired. And we still order books despite all of the weeding…constantly, in fact. They just happen to be mostly fiction books that teens request, or print books and/or audiovisual resources that faculty request for curricular support.