Grappling with Changing Realities

Abstract

Imbued with the sense of mission to serve as cultural and intellectual bastions, research libraries have continued to build collections to meet both immediate and anticipated future scholarly needs across a broad range of disciplines. While this mission may still stand as a guiding precept today, the issues facing collection development librarians have changed immensely since the millennium. Some important questions remain: How do we continue to meet the mission of building research collections in an era marked by considerable budget constraints, technological innovation, new publishing models and changing expectations from users? How do we engage these changing realities? Over the last several years the University of Kansas (KU) Libraries have developed several methods to enhance traditional collection development practices in an effort to grapple with the continuing challenge of building research collections relevant to modern scholars and students. This presentation will provide an overview of these strategies, which have included improved ways both to develop and manage collections. Such methods have included improved ways to manage resource expenditures (spending deadlines, database steward program, approval plan review), engaging in collection building (e-book acquisitions, purchase on demand) and collection management practices (serial review, WorldCat Collection Analysis, significant analysis of recent monographic and database usage), among other approaches. In addition, we have guided our work with ideas gleaned from the perspective of institutional and library leadership about the future of research library collections and where such collections may be headed. The audience will be asked to share methods that we, as collection development professionals, can adopt to balance collection development practices within the institutional framework. Attendees can expect to learn how research libraries are adapting collection development strategies to meet the changing needs of users, ongoing budget constraints, and the vision of the future of collections as articulated by our library leadership.