Book Review: Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management

Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management. 3rd ed. By Peggy Johnson. Chicago: ALA, 2014. 472 p. $75 softbound (ISBN: 978-0-8389-1191-4).

Peggy Johnson has updated her comprehensive text, Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management, for its 3rd edition. Fundamentals is intended as “a comprehensive introduction to the topic for students, a primer for experienced librarians with new collection development and management responsibilities, and a handy reference resource for practitioners as they go about their day-to day work” (ix). The breadth and depth of information Johnson provided is impressive in its coverage, and any reader in her intended audience will glean something relevant and informative from this text. Comprehensive, yet surprisingly easy to read, Johnson’s text is written in a straightforward, informative style and organized into clear chapters and subsections that enable a reader to dip in and out of the text.

The structure of this edition is familiar to readers of earlier versions. It starts with a brief overview of the history and development of collection building as a specialty in the profession, then moves through well-ordered chapters reflecting key elements in collections work, including staffing models, budgets, policies, developing and managing collections, marketing and outreach, collections analysis, cooperative collection building, and scholarly communication. The chapter on scholarly communication has been expanded from the previous edition to acknowledge this ever-shifting environment and the growing roles libraries and librarians serve therein. Each chapter is rounded out with a case study, references, and supplemental reading suggestions. The supplemental reading lists have been comprehensively updated for this new edition and contain no sources published prior to 2008.

In the first edition of her text, published in 2004, Johnson dedicated a chapter to e-resources. Now ten years later, e-resources are of course an integral part of any collection, and Johnson reflects this shift by integrating e-resources throughout her book. This approach certainly makes sense but in some instances results in a level of brevity that doesn’t align with the work’s comprehensive nature. In particular I found the light treatment of evaluative criteria surrounding e-resource purchasing to be concerning. The author does provide a list of additional criteria to consider in a selection decision such as provider business model or licensing and contractual terms, but I fear this is far too brief to be of value for a novice in this field. Expansion on what these criteria may look like in real life and how to fully consider them in the selection decision process would be a significant enhancement.

As she discusses in the preface to this new edition, collection management is “being reshaped by technology and the ubiquity of the Internet,” (ix) and the author states that her aim is to reflect this changing environment with updated and relevant examples, data, and reading lists. While the author certainly exhibits a clear knowledge of current trends and directions, I was disappointed that there was not more discussion of the potential impact of this reshaping. The author describes practices such as patron driven acquisition and macro-level selection, but there is no follow up on how these developments may lead to a questioning of the value of detailed collections work. Examples of libraries that have fully embraced these methods, and the impact they have or have not had on staff roles, would serve to better illustrate the landscape for new collections librarians.

A recurring criticism of the two previous editions was that Johnson focuses on large academic libraries with peripheral coverage of issues relating to collection building in public, special, and school libraries.1 As a reviewer with a background solely in academic libraries, it is hard for me to fully judge whether these criticisms can be fairly levelled at this edition. The author has packed her book full with examples and references from the literature to provide the reader with avenues for further investigation and learning. These examples and references may inherently lead to a skew in coverage because the literature is heavily weighted in discussion of collection building in academic libraries. The case studies at the end of each chapter, however, cover a range of scenarios in different library environments, and the appendices, which list useful professional development resources, selection aids, and sample collection development policies, all seem to cover the broad spectrum of library types. These added resources indicate that the author is striving to make her text applicable to collections librarians across all library environments.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone in the author’s intended audience. The readers most likely to derive benefit are LIS students, as this book could well serve as an authoritative textbook. The case studies of real-world examples are an excellent resource for collections librarians. The author herself acknowledges that collection development and management “is both an art and a science. It results from a combination of knowledge, experience and intuition,” (138) which means it cannot be learned without hands-on practice. But this text offers a comprehensive introduction to put any new collections librarian on the right path.—Annette Day (annette.day@unlv.edu), University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Reference

1. Robert. P. Holley, Review of Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management, by Peggy Johnson, Library Resources & Technical Services 49, no. 1 (2005): 57–58; Susan K. Kendall, Review of Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management, 2nd ed., by Peggy Johnson, Journal of the Medical Library Association 97, no. 4 (2009): 319–20.