Collection development is the skill of choosing, ordering, processing, and keeping up with all the resources available to users of the school library, such as print, audio-visual material, visual aids, websites, blogs, and e-books. A meaningful learning environment with materials that fulfil the demands of all users is made possible by the collection, which draws in students as well as teachers (Stevens et al., 2012).
A well-defined school library’s policies represent the school’s goals, objectives, ethos, mission, and realities. The policies outline the responsibilities of the school’s curriculum, teacher’s needs, the development of inquiry skills, reading promotion and motivation, the unique requirements and preferences of the school community, and the variety of society beyond the school( Oberg & Schultz, 2015).
Collection development policy should include the mission and purpose of the school, short- and long-term objectives of resources, and responsibilities for collection management decisions. Collection procedures serve as a guide for resource acquisition, cataloguing, shelving, and deselection (Oberg & Schultz, 2015).
While I analysed the collection development policy of St. Andrew’s Cathedral School, it had common collection items of philosophy, purpose, selection criteria, procedure for challenging material, weeding policy, and disaster plan. It has no collection evaluation, which is highly needed in a collection development policy, because the teacher librarian can make sure the library management policy meets the demands of the curriculum, the teachers, and the students by regularly assessing the collection and checking whether the funds are appropriately allocated to the most important subjects and collections (Johnson, 2014).
References
Johnson, P. (2014). Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management (3rd ed.). American Library Association.
Oberg, D., & Schultz-Jones, B. (eds.). (2015). 4.3.1 Collection management policies and procedures. In IFLA School Library Guidelines, (2nd ed.), (pp. 33-34). IFLA.
Stephens, C. Gatrell., & Franklin, P. (2012). School library collection development just the basics. Libraries Unlimited.