Category: Collection Development

Multnomah County Library’s “Guide Boxes,”

Voyager Kits & Itty Bitty Brain Boxes from Valnet, a consortium of public and school libraries in north central Idaho and southeastern Washington

If you maintain a separate print reference collection for kids, what titles are on your shelves?  How current is your collection?  What kind of use does your children’s reference collection get?

As I visit different libraries around the state, I wonder about the practice of keeping print reference collections for children and even adults.  Reference materials are costly, and they take up much shelf space.   Given the availability of online reference material and electronic databases, I know it must be hard to decide what to keep in the print reference collection and what to weed.

Some librarians justify their reference materials by pointing out that school assignments often require kids to use print materials.  Others say that outdated encyclopedias still contain good information, and that they have no funds to purchase a new set.

In some places, librarians have dismantled their print reference collections.  They have tossed old and under-used reference materials and interfiled other reference works with their nonfiction collection.  Most report that these interfiled titles increase in circulation.

I applaud those librarians who are tackling this issue with creative ideas.  It’s a whole new world of reference these days, and libraries need to start thinking in new ways about print reference collections.  So, what do you think and what have you done about reference materials in your library?

The first three people who reply to this message will receive a new book on the van!

Schools around the country are preparing to adopt the Common Core State Standards, a national set of educational expectations for all students.  These standards will impact both school curricula as well as school library collections, but they will also have implications for public library collections as youth services librarians often provide materials for school children. The Common Core calls for students to read a “diverse array of classic and contemporary literature as well as challenging informational texts in a range of subjects.”  The Common Core Standards name many of these works, and librarians should be aware of them.  Unfortunately, while the list includes excellent titles, many of them have old copyrights, and may be difficult to find.  Here’s the list of supplemental titles for the English Language Arts standard (See Appendix B).  You can also download the entire set of standards on the homepage, which includes the core titles recommended by the standards committee.

At the recent Small Libraries Summit, one panelist mentioned that her library interfiled juvenile and adult nonfiction books.  She said her community and staff liked the arrangement.  Adult patrons could find titles of varying levels (and with richer pictorial works)  shelved together and thus avoid the stigma of looking for materials at a lower reading level in the children’s department.  At the same time, children who were advanced readers could find all the material on one topic in the same place.  It also made shelving easier for staff.  Materials were still catalogued and labeled as either j nonfiction or (adult) nonfiction, but they were put in the same collection area.

Whether or not you should adopt this kind of practice depends entirely on what makes sense for your community and for the physical space in your library.  In small libraries with children’s and adult areas close together physically, it certainly seems advantageous to put all of these informational books together.

Some libraries, however, have very separate children’s and adult areas that are often on different floors.  In these cases, it may be problematic to interfile nonfiction.  Also, if shelves in the adult area are high, many nonfiction books may be inaccessible for many children.  In addition, only including fiction in the children’s area sends a subtle message that these types of books are what kids should read, and this may inhibit those children (especially boys) who read only nonfiction.  If it’s “out of sight” in a children’s area, a young nonfiction reader may not see the children’s area as a place for him.  In addition, more and more of the nonfiction being published is recreational, rather than strictly informational.  More children are seeking nonfiction books not for school assignments, but for reading pleasure. Putting these recreational nonfiction books written for children in the adult nonfiction area may make them harder to find.

In the articles I read on this subject, nearly every writer cited the advantage for the adult reader as the greatest benefit of interfiling juvenile and nonfiction.  As children’s librarians, I think we can certainly see advantages for young readers, but we also must weigh lots of other factors in deciding whether this arrangement makes sense.