School Library Connection Archive

Building the Collection

Course
Closing [1:11]
In this course, you learned to assess community needs and evaluate your library collection, then select and process resources using your findings. In many ways, the library collection is the foundation of the school library program. From all the stuff you have in your collection—and the system for organizing and using it—librarians construct and teach lessons, provide reference, offer recreational reading, and design loads of activities and events. To make all that possible, you need to build your collection in an ongoing way, in a cycle of formalized exercises and day-to-day interactions.
Now that you have learned the basics of collection development, it may be a good time to review or begin your library's collection development plan. First, find out if you have one, and if you do, see what it contains and when it was updated last.

To review the collection development plan is the set of documents that, "defines the scope of a library's existing collections. Plans for the continuing development of resources identifies collection strengths and outlines the relationship between selection, philosophy and the institution's goals, general selection criteria and intellectual freedom" (this is according to the Guide for Written Collection Development Policy Statements from ALA in 1996).

In other words, the collection development plan is the school-specific articulation of what you've learned here, a guide for creating the collection that your learning community needs. Sustaining that collection through maintenance, weeding, and repair is a separate chapter, and I encourage you to take the workshop, Maintaining the Collection, to build that expertise.

Additional Resources

Bibliography.

About the Author

Stacy Brown

Stacy Brown, MLIS, is the 21st-century learning coordinator at the Davis Academy, Atlanta, GA. Stacy earned a bachelor's in English and a minor in French from the University of Texas at Austin, and a master's in library and information sciences from Florida State University. She is the author of The School Librarian's Technology Playbook: Innovative Strategies to Inspire Teachers and Learners and chairs AASL's Collaborative School Library Award Committee. Stacy served as a visiting professor at the University of Washington's iSchool teaching about marketing for libraries and information organizations. Stacy shares technology integration strategies and innovative library programming on Twitter @21stStacy. She can be reached via email at stacybrownreads@gmail.com.

MLA Citation

Brown, Stacy. "Building the Collection. Closing [1:11]." School Library Connection, ABC-CLIO, February 2023, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2293929?learningModuleId=2293930&topicCenterId=2247902.

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https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2293929?learningModuleId=2293930&topicCenterId=2247902

Entry ID: 2293929