[WEB4LIB] FW: Important Article -II

[David Merchant]

>This approach to collection development hurts our patrons in two ways. 
>First, we waste their money buying books they don’t use,
>just in case they might want them. And, secondly, we spend so much money 
>buying books they don’t want, we do not have
>enough left over to purchase an adequate amount of the material they do 
>want. 

Hmm, I've seen that it is often the buying of outrageously priced serials
that most hurt our abilities to buy books.  Serials that are often there
just so tenure-tracked folk can publish and not perish (and, yes, I'm on a
tenure track myself), and sit unused for the most part, but we can't get
rid of them, we must keep them.  But that's another heated debate and I
digress.  Back to the above statement.  If we have this great and glorious
global catalog, the books still have to exist and sit somewhere, in some
library, to be loaned out.  If every library goes "book Y is used only once
a year, so lets not keep it" because it is not a highly requested item at
all locally (say some highly technical book on some esoteric subject
matter), but, because the population is around 6 Billion now, there could
be tens of thousands of people who would be interested in the book, but no
library holds it because they all think "some other library will have it"
and so the book isn't bought hardly at all (even much less than normal for
highly technical books) and thus the publisher very quickly stops
publishing it, and well you get the picture.  Even if a few libraries
somehow have the book, the demand for it could be so that the patron finds
it even harder now to get the book.  Centralization has many many pitfalls
.  Yes, maybe an extreme example, but the problem it highlights is still
real.  

TTFN,
David








Systems Librarian, Louisiana Tech University 
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