The Point of Collection Mapping

 

O’Donnell, Meghan.

Herren, A. (2021). Transforming library collections and supporting student learning with collection mapping. The Serials Librarian, 80(1-4), 142-148. https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2021.1883207

Summary:

A community college library in Florida revamped their collection to better align with curriculum using collection mapping in 2015. The project improved alignment to curriculum, collection diversity, and relations between library staff and college faculty. Having less unneeded works made room for more study space which students had been requesting. Circulation did not improve in the 6 years since then. However, at least the library staff know that what is circulating better meets student needs. When the project began in 2015, research showed that students tended to prefer print works over digital for research. As the project progressed, research in 2018 showed that digital works were beginning to be preferred over print by students. Therefore, the lack of improved physical circulation does not show a failure of the project.

Evaluation or opinion:

Since we approached collection mapping using infographics, I thought the process was mostly visual. I read an academic article about a university library’s experience using collection mapping. This article changed my understanding of collection mapping. I’m no longer seeing it as some ethereal thing. It is a tool used to accomplish a purpose.

Collection mapping has nothing to do with helping patrons or potential sources of funding understand your collection. It is not about creating an easily grasped visual or graphically displaying information. You might end up creating a collection map that is nice in those ways. However, doing so is not your goal.

The point of collection mapping is to assist library staff in charge of collection management. You need to identify what your collection contains, check for gaps and saturation points, and ensure that your collection aligns with user needs. It is a tool for selection and deselection. It could possibly be a tool for looking at rearranging your layout.

The appearance of your collection map does not matter. It might be a massive boring spreadsheet. It is simply data that represents your collection. You don’t need to make the data attractive. You just need to make the data actionable so you can act on the data and make your collection as useful as possible.

The article I read was Transforming Library Collections and Supporting Student Learning with Collection Mapping  by Arenthia Herren. Herren relayed the experience of using collection mapping to revamp physical holdings at Florida SouthWestern State College Libraries in 2015. The project realigned the holdings to better align with curriculum. Most interesting to me was that the libraries sought syllabi from classes and used them to determine what to have in the library collection.

I cannot use this technique for my non-school-affiliated library. However, that tactic has made me consider what I could do along the same lines. Homeschooling parents make heavy use of my juvenile nonfiction section. Are there homeschool educational benchmarks for my state that I could align some of my juvenile nonfiction collection to meet? The article made me think and definitely improved my understanding of what collection mapping accomplishes.

Library collections and services during Covid-19: Qatar National Library experience

Medawar, K., & Tabet, M. (2020). Library collections and services during Covid-19: Qatar National Library experience. Alexandria: The Journal of National and International Library and Information Issues, 30(2–3), 178–190. https://doi.org/10.1177/0955749020986377

 Summary:

This article talks about the changes made in library collections and services during the COVID-19 pandemic with a focus on the Qatar National Library. Because of the pandemic, many libraries like the Qatar National Library had to change the way they handled their collection and resources. Global and international library associates came together to put together guides and best practices and protocols in order to deal with the situation. Maybe hybrid libraries (with physical and electronic resources) had to switch to digital in a short amount of time. The Qatar National Library just opened in November 2017, and it known as a National, Public, and Research library. This space is quite exceptional looking and was designed so elegantly and beautifully. Their open space was inviting to all visitors and they also had more than one million books and more than 500,000 e-books, periodicals, newspapers, and special collections. Unfortunately, the library had to close it's doors in March 2020 because of the pandemic and they had to initiate a digital transformation with a huge impact on staff, services, and collections. This library used to host 90 events per month, but because of the pandemic, they had to replace those events with online Microsoft Teams events. There was also increase of social media use to promote programs and resources because that was their best way to get the word out. 

Insight and Thoughts: 

Reading through one library's experience definitely gives you a perspective of how quickly and easily their focus can change. Within a few years, they had to completely alter their way of presenting their services and resources to their patrons. All that money, effort, and time spent on a phenomenal space, and they had to shut it all down. The designers and creators had a vision of people coming into this library in big groups to show off their design and artistic interior, but now it is so much different from what they had imagined it would be. It makes me wonder if any future developers in libraries will want to spend all this money on designing physical spaces when more and more resources will be available online. Will there be a need for spaces like this? Will people prefer to come together in a building like this when everything is easily assessible online? Digital transformation has become so crucial and almost normal to our current society. The new generation will expect their resources to be available remotely. It also goes to show how adaptable library and library collection management has to be. There could be so many factors that come into play when it comes to collection planning and management. Curve balls can be thrown at you at anytime, and as librarians, we'll need to be prepared for them!

 

 Aggleton, J. (2018). Where are the children in children’s collections? An exploration of ethical principles and practical concerns surrounding children’s participation in collection development. The New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship, 24(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/13614541.2018.1429122

Summary: 

    This article considers the role of children in the development and selection of children's services collections. The author argues that, as the target audience of a children's services collection, children should be involved in this selection process. Children are almost entirely absent from involvement in the writing and publication of children's books, and by keeping them out of the collection development process at school and public libraries, children's literature becomes a reflection of adult culture rather than child culture as is the aim. However, the author does not propose that the process should be handed over to children entirely. Rather, it is argued that libraries and librarians must develop an understanding that "It is not sufficient for adults to assume that they understand children’s opinions on children’s literature" and as such it "is needed is for the librarian or archivist to find ways to enable children to participate, though not to have total control over the process". 

Evaluation:

    I found myself in full agreement with most of what the author of this article was presenting. It is entirely too common for librarians in charge of developing youth or children's collections to do so without any input or participation from the audience they are seeking to serve. The assumption that adults have a firm knowledge on the tastes and desires of young readers must be abolished. While this article doesn't necessarily provide practical steps for facilitating the involvement of children in the selection process, it provides a solid theoretical understanding for the importance of doing so and could be used to support the implementation of these practices in library systems that are hesitant to do so. 

 Chapman, E. L., & Birdi, B. (2016). “It’s Woefully Inadequate”: Collections of LGBTQ* Fiction for Teens in English Public Library Services. Journal of Research on Libraries & Young Adults, 7(1), 1–29.

Summary:

This article highlights a study conducted in the UK that investigates how accessible and available LGBTQ+ fiction is to teens in British libraries. Using a mix methods approach they compared library holdings and collections to a list of LGBTQ+ resources and titles they created and collected to see how  much of that list was present and in what formats. Sadly the reported findings suggested that very few libraries had a strong collection of up to date and positive LGBTQ+ fiction available for young readers. Research suggested there were significant gaps and much needed room for improvement across most of the library branches they surveyed. The MLIS staff who were interviewed were often shocked and disappointed that so little relevant titles and resources were available.

Evaluation: 

Though the results of the study proved disappointing because of the clear lack of titles available to LGBTQ+ youth and teens the study was very successful in exposing a gap in the collection. The results of the study were distributed to the branches they conducted their research at and the staff were able to see their lack of collection and start to address it. The staff also were given access to the list created be the researchers so they could build and grow their collection of LGBTQ+ materials that are genuinely wanted by LGBTQ+ teens. 

Library as Infrastructure

Summary:

In this article Shannon Mattern lays out a fascinating historical perspective of the development of physical attributes of a library and how they influence and are influenced by the media that they house.  She starts with Mevil Dewey’s influence on all aspects of the library in terms of not only the organization of materials (like the Dewey Decimal System) but also the physical apparati that we use to access information (like the original card catalog that we used to organize the metadata).  Mevil Dewey, among many things, was an entrepreneur that had his hands in everything and anything that had to do with information, including how we develop it, organize it, access it and distribute it.  

The author, Mattern, continues from this historical perspective toward our present day libraries addressing the question, ' what is the library and what is its purpose?’  We no longer have Mevil Dewey to guide the answers to these questions, but we do have many new players that influence the direction of the library as a concept.  Including David Weinberger, who suggested that the library should consider itself a ‘platform’ for the creation of knowledge.   Mattern has some issues with this concept and instead suggests that the library is not just a “two-dimensional” space for the creation of information but is rather a vastly more complex infrastructure that embodies all information in all of its forms.  

Starting from the assumption that the library is the physical and digital infrastructure of information, Mattern continues to support this concept in addressing two forms of infrastructure (social infrastructure and technological-intellectual infrastructure).  Through this lens she explains the library's role in developing the infrastructures that ultimately influences the community that the library serves.  

Why this article is valuable to me and why I think in may be valuable to you:

As a new student to LIS, I am constantly feeling (and hearing from professors) that the library is struggling to define itself in this information age.  Most (almost all?) information that used to be physically housed in a library is now housed digitally and can be accessed privately.  People used to go to the library for answers, now they can go to their computers.  So, I’m constantly asking, ‘what is the library? And why is it important in this new era?’  I think this article really helped me to understand or to at least have a vision of what the library is in this new world that we now live in.  

Reference:

  Mattern. (2014). Library as Infrastructure. Places (Cambridge, Mass.), 2014. https://doi.org/10.22269/140609

Metadata for diversity: Identification and implications of potential access points for diverse library resources.

Fran Prather

Rachel, I. C., & Schoonmaker, S. (2020). Metadata for diversity: Identification and implications of

potential access points for diverse library resources. Journal of Documentation, 76(1), 173-196. 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JD-01-2019-0003.

Summary:

This article begins with the premise that diversity is one of the core values of American librarianship and that libraries must promote diverse materials and advocate for diverse communities. After a literature review that begins with the seminal "Windows and Mirrors" premise of Bishop (1990), the authors present their research and findings on the challenges of using metadata to tag resources for diversity. Diversity in this case included "baskets":  gender, occupation, geographic region, audience, age, race, ethnicity, cultural identity, indigeneity, gender identity, LGBTQIA+, and disability. Specific problems included content creators and whether or not the creator themselves wanted to be identified by these elements and the lack of a a way to specify these areas in MARC records. Also of concern is a recognition that these baskets do not allow for nuances in intersectional relationships. Noted in these elements were also specifically American social practices and ethnocentrism, which cloud tags and may further the "othering" of marginalized communities. Of major concern was the lack of specificity in disability and indigeneity, which almost erased mention of these populations, further marginalizing large groups of already minoritized communities. The authors suggest that "any access points to describe diverse reading materials needs to consider support for self-identification, impermanent and flexible metadata, and intentional and explicit positionality" (p.192). 

Analysis/Reaction:

This research is timely and welcome. As a high school librarian who has worked to diversify my school's collection, I have been quite frustrated by attempts to acquire new materials, perform a diversity analysis of the collection, and with how to tag materials so that patrons can locate them by as possible keywords as available. The idea of crowdsourcing the tagging to allow for flexible metadata is intriguing in a school library; is the student population trustworthy in this regard? After all, we have books on the Holocaust that have been physically vandalized with swastikas - do we want to open tagging to students online? How does a librarian manage the tagging?- One of my own concerns is how to promote diversity without furthering stereotypes or "othering," a concern shared by the authors of this article as needing further research.  

Loud Hands in the Library Neurodiversity in LIS Theory & Practice

 Lawrence, E. (2013). Loud Hands in the Library Neurodiversity in LIS Theory & Practice. Progressive Library Guild. http://www.progressivelibrariansguild.org/Braverman/Braverman2013.pdf

Lawrence asks how might we approach neurological difference in a library setting’s physical layout. Something I haven't thought about before. 

Lawrence introduces numerous approaches to neurodiversity including the Medical Approach, the Social Approach and the Neurodiversity-Based Approach. Some differentiation on these approaches help clear up common questions librarians have about disability and neurodiversity. The medical approach is more qualitative and less sensitive to people’s humanity. Doctors speak of Autism as an epidemic and see the spectrum as only "high to low functioning".  The social approach is the most common approach in society and the “social model depicts disability as a socially constructed phenomenon, the product of systematic discrimination” (Lawrence 3). The Neurodiversity-Based Approach is a more contemporary approach.   “Neurodiversity advocates seek “better social support mechanisms, greater understanding from those around them or those who treat them, and a recognition that, though they are neurologically, cognitively and behaviorally different, they do not necessarily suffer from being neuro-diverse nor do they need to be cured” (Fenton & Krahn, 2007; Lawrence, 4). 

Lawrence does justice to this topic by highlighting the lack of publications on these issues including only 3 articles on Assistive Technology is shocking. This brings this issue to the information professionals so in the future there may be more publications on these issues. 

Lawrence asks how might we do better? Getting away from referring to autistics in a clinical medical approach is one way to do better. Lawrence  suggests asking persons with autism directly and collaborating with  Autistic-run Organizations as a means for taking Autistics seriously as a user group and as a community. Creating meaningful connections and seeing persons with autism as individual users with specific needs.