The Educators Guide to Pinterest

O'Brien, Sarah

Muther, Sarah. (2015) The Educators Guide to Pinterest. Edudemic: Connecting Education and Technology. 

Now that learning is happening online, it’s no surprise that bulletin boards have moved online, enter Pinterest. Teachers, Librarians and Educators use the Platform for many reasons including staying organized, planning projects or collecting material for class discussions. Librarians are running reading programs and creating book lists on top of using it for creative purposes like story times, crafts and (actual) bulletin boards. With a guide for educators on how to use the application, Sarah Muther, provides an in depth outline including planning lessons, fostering collaboration, sharing ideas and providing a list of pinners to follow.

Although this article is very brief in its explanation on how librarians can use the Pinterest application, from the perspective of the (almost) children’s librarian at my library, I use Pinterest for a lot of ideas, whether working with volunteers or using it for personal projects. As the Youth Service Coordinator, I use it to build upon story hour and bulletin board ideas. The author points out that librarians use Pinterest to build book lists and even run reading programs. Just recently, I noticed an adult program called the Pinterest Club, I couldn’t help but join in. There are so many great ways to incorporate Pinterest into the workplace and the library is an excellent place to connect resources and information back into the collections and programs.    

Building and Evaluating Juvenile Collections in Academic Libraries

O'Brien, Sarah

Williams, Virginia Kay. (2011) Building and Evaluating Juvenile Collections in Academic Libraries. Wichita State University. Pg 1-25

Although many college and university librarians support teacher education programs, relatively little attention has been paid to developing juvenile literature collections that support these programs. This paper discusses needs of education students and characteristics of juvenile literature which academic librarians should consider when developing collections. It examines standard tools for selecting children’s and young adult materials and analyzes their usefulness for building collections that support teacher preparation programs. Finally, it provides practical advice for evaluating juvenile collections and selecting materials to fill gaps in support for teacher preparation programs in mathematics, art and other subjects. (taken from the abstract)

While teacher education programs and majors are common in colleges and universities, these courses are not necessarily targeting academic librarians, they are intended to appeal to public and school librarians. Instead of adding material to a collection they know, it is important that academic librarians “understand how education students use juvenile literature, the characteristics of juvenile literature, and the standard tools available for selecting and evaluating children and young adult collections.” As academic librarians, they should be studying and reviewing the majors and certification programs on campus and talking with faculty staff about how they use juvenile literature in teaching. Important questions to consider may include: how do you use children and young adult books when teaching? What assignments do you give that require students to use juvenile books? Would you be willing to share a copy of your syllabus? Etc. Being a part of these types of classes will help the academic librarian build better collections focusing on children’s and young adult literature and teaching methods for education.

Checking out tomorrow’s school library collections

Gates, Angela

Stephens, W. (2014). Checking out tomorrow’s school library collections. Young Adult Library Services, 12(3), 17-19.

I thought this was an interesting article on collection development trends in school libraries. The author interviewed three library professionals—a university faculty member, an instructional media/technology coordinator, and a school librarian—to assess their thoughts on the future of collection development.

One of the points made in the article that I found particularly relevant to what we have been studying lately was the idea that rather than trying to represent everything, school libraries should develop collections based on the unique needs and requirements of the schools that they serve. One of the interviewees is quoted in the article as saying that a school library’s collection should be “unbalanced”—meaning that the school library should not attempt to devote equal resources to all parts of the collection.  For example, a school library that serves a high population of students without access to books (either at home or through a public library) might want to devote more of its resources to the fiction collection.  The school library that I volunteer in serves an elementary school that has a quarterly science or social studies thematic curriculum (e.g. Geology, Immigration etc.), studied by all the grades in the school, so our library needs a depth of resources in these particular topical areas.

Other important points made in the article were very much in line with what we have been discussing this semester: for example, looking beyond purchasing print materials, particularly for non-fiction materials, and the impact of Common Core standards on school libraries.

The P-D-A of It: Chicago Public Library's Patron-Driven Acquisitions Pilot, Part 1 estimated 5 pgs

Natalie Villegas 

INFO 266: Spring 2016

Medlar, M., Murphy, D. M., & Sposato, S. (2014, October). The P-D-A of It: Chicago Public Library's Patron-Driven Acquisitions Pilot, Part 1. Z687: Creating the Future of Technical Services. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/alcts/resources/z687/cplpda1#a1 

In Chicago Public Library’s quest to develop a more patron driven collection development process they examined several processes and vendor roles. One was the Demand Driven Acquisitions (DDA) which calls for the collection department to preload potential titles to focus rather than limit materials as there is a large selection of titles in publication to choose from. The Chicago public library felt by having titles preloaded would bring awareness to patrons who wouldn’t have thought to make recommendations or bring awareness to the possibilities available. The preselection process is done through Ingram, which provides collection development services for a fee. Ingram will create a list of potential titles based on the Chicago Public Library’s parameters; then the staff in the collection development team reviews it and deletes any titles that already exist in the collection.  After this process the new titles are then incorporated in to the open catalog to be discovered.

The way in which the Chicago Public Library developed the parameters in which Ingram used for the selection process was quite efficient and established good guidelines for what would be desired by the community. The first step for the public library was to pull two years’ worth of inter library loan requests to review for patterns in publishers and subjects. Instead of selecting individual titles, the Chicago Public Library would preload full lists from trusted publishers; this was not only done for efficiency sake, but to guarantee that niche-interest titles would not be overlooked.

As noted in the article, the selections were divided into two parts:

1. the initial set-up, basically a PDA opening day collection that would populate the catalog with two years of back-list content; and
2. the ongoing titles, which would be what we would update the catalog with on a monthly basis moving ahead through the life of the project.

It is interesting to note they melded the current collection development and public driven acquisition processes together by having a delay in the monthly upload of titles; meaning there was an established 5 month lag. For example the titles uploaded in May would have been those titles selected in January, in order to provide time for the normal collection development to take place. Its interesting to note they still highlight the need for human involvement in the selection process before the list is incorporated. Chicago Public Library notes that occasionally books that technically meet the parameters will still need to be cut because they don’t meet the collection guidelines. The examples used in the writing include gift edition sets, and those materials selected at a higher scholarly level then that selected for their community. This also led to some publishers being dropped, such as Yale, Princeton, and Oxford publishing.

Since the projects initiation (fall 2013) the library has seen some “5,611 title added to the catalog based on the established parameters; 934 (16%) have been selected for purchase costing approximately $19,120”. The topics have consisted of computer programming, general technology, business, spiritual and religious nonfiction, an self-help titles. Of the 77 locations in the public library system, patrons from 74 locations have participated in the pilot program. 

Open Source Library Services Platform

Greta Acosta

Breeding, M. (2016, April). EBSCO supports new open source project. American Libraries. Retrieved from: https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2016/04/22/ebsco-kuali-open-source-project/

EBSCO Supports New Open Source Project


The survival and future of libraries begins with such innovative projects as the one featured in this article. The project borrows from the very successful business models of tech industry giants such as Apple. Instead of developing one rigid software, EBSCO will fund a platform where collaborators are given the autonomy and flexibility needed in order to expand and maintain the system.

"Its launch opens a new chapter in the library technology industry—potentially wielding an even greater impact than the latest rounds of mergers and acquisitions."

Book Trends and the Future

O'Brien, Sarah

Kellogg, Carolyn. (2016) Six Book Trends for 2016: Look Into The Future. Los Angeles Times.

Although this article is not directly about libraries and their collections, I think it is important to implement the trends this writer suggests. It was reported that 571 million print books were sold in 2015, while ebooks sales stayed at 25% this past year. We all worry that print is dead, luckily this statistic proves otherwise. With print books coming back, Harper Lee’s much anticipated second book “Go Set A Watchman”, David McCullough’s book about the Wright Brothers and Jeff Kinney’s Diary of Wimpy Kid Series, along with the spike in coloring book sales, print books are on the way back, which means libraries are getting busy. With magazines going by the wayside and bookstores closing left and right, libraries are full of titles and material just waiting to be discovered. With box office success like Star Wars, Harry Potter and highly anticipated television shows like Game of Thrones, the fantasy doesn’t stop after two hours. Publishers and Marketers want to keep fans in the loop, buy Game of Thrones action figures and games, visit theme parks (have you been to Harry Potter World yet?) and stock up on every book ever written about Star Wars because it’s out there. It’s not just about the movie experience anymore, we live in world where we can further explore the worlds that authors create.  And although journalism is taking new shapes, we know that with the success of podcasts like Serial, the Netflix original docu-series, Making a Murder and the fantastic reporter and sensational nonfiction writer, Jon Krakauer, it’s clear that deeply reported nonfiction stories have a ready audience.  The last point that is brought up in this article is a call to diversity in books. Toni Morrison was the last American award the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, as our country becomes more multicultural, it’s important that we have something for everyone.

Again, this article is not really discussing these trends in the library setting but I think it’s important that these trends can be used as connections to make library collections stronger, programs/events bigger and better and make the library experience as a whole an important part of our weekly routines. This article can serve as an excellent guide as we think about collection development and programming for the future. With the release of the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens, many libraries are adopting a whole festival celebrating the world and characters George Lucas created. The same can be said with diversity in literature. This is something that we have been struggling with for years, as a Children’s Librarian I am constantly looking to publishers that focus on diverse stories and searching for authors of different ethnicities. In fact, I came across this blogger and author from London, Ann Morgan and her quest to read books from all over the world. Looking to the future of libraries, all these points and trends that the author brings up are very relevant to sustaining successful libraries.  

Patron-Driven Acquisitions at City University of New York

Hober, Michael

Egan, N., Yearwood, S. L., & Kendrick, C. L. (2016). Patron-driven acquisitions at the City University of New York: A case study. Technical Services Quarterly, 33(2), 131-144.

Descriptive Summary: This study describes how a patron-driven acquisition system was tried at City University of New York, which is made up of 24 colleges spread throughout New York City. Working with publishers, they developed a list of 4,602 titles were not duplicated within their library system that would be automatically purchased when patrons viewed these items beyond the table of contents when browsing. Their $75,000 budget lasted for four months with this system. They found that several concerns present in their literature review - that collection quality would diminish, that patrons would intentionally trigger purchases, and that librarians would assert influence over the process - were not found to be issues in this program.  The authors conclude that if budget limitations and the time to set the program up to run well were not so high that they would continue to use this as a tool for collection development in the future.  

Evaluation: The article does a good job of highlighting how important the work of setting up the program before its implementation was in the success of the program. The librarians who implemented this needed to comb through all 24 college libraries to eliminate duplication, select titles appropriate for their college aged audience, and negotiate with publishers before the program went live. Their work beforehand was what allowed them to have a successful program that avoided the common pitfalls that participants in similar programs that were discussed in the literature review had issues with.  Even so, I'm not entirely convinced that patron-driven acquisitions should be a large part of collection development, though maybe it can have some small role.