Sacred Stacks: The Higher Purpose of Libraries and Librarianship by Nancy Kalikow Maxwell, MLS

St. Jerome in his Study, 1480 - By Domenico Ghirlandaio - 
Italian Artist - Ognissanti, Florence, Italy - SAINTS - 1480 - fresco

DiBello, Amy

Maxwell, N. (2006). Sacred stacks: The higher purpose of libraries and librarianship. 

Chicago: American Library Association.

Nancy Kalikow Maxwell, MLS, M.A., is a Jewish librarian who maximized

her time during her tenure at the Catholic University, Barry University,

by getting a degree in Catholic theology.Her book Sacred Stacks: 
The Higher Purpose of Libraries and Librarianship is a treatise about the 
spiritual and sacred qualities of libraries and librarianship.

Maxwell begins with an examination of how many Americans identify as

"spiritual, but not religious". The sacred and secular blend of libraries is something

most library patrons have identified and expressed to me over the years.

I also consider libraries to be sacred and feel blessed to have meaningful work

in our admirable profession.

There are the patron saints of librarianship to look up to St. Jerome,

St. Catherine of Alexandria, and most notably St. Lawrence,

who would not surrender the archives to Imperial Roman officials in 258 BCE,

which resulted in his being grilled alive. St. Lawrence is famous for telling

his torturers that he was done on one side and to turn him over.

Sacred Stacks equates librarians as confessors through the art of the reference

interview and social justice warriors fiercely protecting patrons' privacy.

Melvil Dewey, creator of his famous Dewey decimal classification system

referred to the education of librarians as “the suburbs of the holy field.”

Librarians do not have supernatural powers, such as parting the Red Sea,

but their knowledge and instincts with cataloging, classification and

saving patrons from drowning in fruitless Google searches, earns Maxwell’s

accolades of “Representing the universe of knowledge through organized systems

for thousands of years.”

Mining and Analyzing Circulation and ILL Data for Informed Collection Development

Poster: Curtin, Shane

Link, F. l., Tosaka, Y. t., & Weng, C. W. (2015). Mining and Analyzing Circulation and ILL Data for Informed Collection Development. College & Research Libraries, 76(6), 740-755.


Summary:

This article describes how one library tried reviewed ILL usage and  borrowing statistics for their academic journals in an attempt to asses the strength of their own collection. They drew on circulation data for each LOC class and compared it across a variety of factors. The results were more complex than they had expected. The question posed by their results was not what specific items to buy, but what subject areas to buy for.  They also realized that user preferences for different material types (such as digital journals versus print journals) could not be inferred through the aforementioned methods of study, since people will tend to order whatever is available. The researchers concluded by proposing a further study to address this question, and to establish benchmarks for collection use as it relates to purchasing. How much circulation should be expected for every dollar spent?


Analysis:

In my own library the ILL librarian does not fraternize much with the selectors. The number of ILLs we receive is small and seldom do we get more than one request per item in any considerable span of time. Due to our library’s membership in LINK+ we already have access to the catalogs of most Californa and Nevada libraries; most items can be obtained this way. We DO look at Link+ circ stats to see if we should order something, but not at ILL stats. Most ILL orders are for rare and old-out of print items anyway, not thing we could get our hands on even if we wanted to. Even so, this study was interesting vis-a-vis the content of our class. At the end of the study the author noted that the study is not to be taken as just an investigation of their own circulation, but as a parable of the effectiveness of using circulation stats as  collection development metric.

They of course, used LC call numbers as subject identifiers. While this is not the method recommended by this class, it is the only one available to most libraries, lest they choose to tag their records by subject collection, as we have been doing. In order for circulation data to be valuable to collection development in this sort of arrangement, a new field of some sort would have to be added in item records, denoting their collection grouping. An alternate method that occurs to me is to try and mine the subject data from the MARC 650 fields, but the variety of subject terms are much to numerous to  make this an effective strategy. If we escape the rigid methods of classic collection development by Dewey and item type, other methods of identification will have to be devised to make circulation data sortable in way that is useful  to selectors.

I was amused by one collection use measurement tool the author mentioned- the CFQ (Collection Failure Quotient) - a ratio of a library’s ILL borrowings to holdings. I think my own library is doing ok.

The Fight of the Century: Dewey vs. Genre Classification Systems

Laudato, Maricar

Buchter, H. (2013). Dewey vs. genre throwdown. Knowledge Quest, 42(2), 50-57.

Summary

In this article, Holli Buchter outlines the overhaul of the Red Hawk elementary school library’s classification system from the Dewey Decimal System to an organization system based on genre named after her, the BCS (Buchter Classification System). In this system, fiction books are organized by genre, nonfiction books are organized by subject, and all “call numbers” on the spine are word based—there are no numbers. The result—it was a success with the entire community and circulation statistics across fiction and nonfiction titles went way up, especially when compared to neighboring schools that still utilized the DDC.

Evaluation

 

I’ve been talking about overhauling our classification system from Dewey to a subject specific one as well, but it terrifies me because I love being organized. A project of such magnitude would involve getting used to a large measure of chaos, especially in the beginning. I’m hoping to see if there are any local high school libraries who have done this already so that there is some type of model that our school library can refer to. It’s going to take a lot of teeth-pulling, however, to get a project like this approved!