- What are the practicalities of undertaking a collection evaluation within a school in terms of time, staffing, and priorities, as well as appropriateness of methodology?
In the rural small central school library in which I work as both a TL and a classroom teacher, annual collection evaluation is not a practical process. A method such as curriculum mapping is time consuming, and evaluation should be an ongoing process if it is to be effective. However, this is a monumental task when you consider all the other more pressing issues the TL faces on a daily basis: resource identification, evaluation and selection; accessioning and covering; promoting; program writing for library classes; resource creation for library classes; returning and borrowing; collaboration and meetings with staff; event planning; management of the library space, etc. When you’ve only got an additional staff member with you for an hour a day at most, when you’ve got a class in for library to assist with borrowing and returning, evaluating the collection is a monumental and time-consuming task that the TL, on their own and without release time, simply does not have time or the capacity to achieve on an ongoing basis.
- How does the need for, and possible benefits of an evaluation of the collection outweigh the difficulties of undertaking such an evaluation?
The benefits of being able to develop short and long term goals in order to create a focused collection, create selection procedures to match these goals, and build a budget to subsequently meet them would result in a balanced, well resourced library that meets the needs of both staff and students. Not engaging in collection evaluation means that collections have the potential to become outdated, weak, and do not reflect the curriculum or the needs of the leanring community.
- Is it better to use a simple process with limited but useful outcomes, or to use the most appropriate methodology in terms of outcomes?
It depends on the timing. If the collection has never been evaluated, then the most appropriate method to get the most reliable and useful outcome in terms of usable data is the better option. However, this is likely not a viable approach for a yearly evaluation, due to the time it takes to implement. It could be implemented at the start of a TLs new role (or if it has never been done) to get baseline data and become familiar with the collection in order to determine goals, and then it would be more beneficial to implement a simpler process with limited data/outcomes on an ongoing/yearly basis. More comprehensive analysis would need to occur however every 5-10 years to get comprehensive results and a better understanding of where the collection is currently at in terms of quality and relevance.
- What are the current priority areas for evaluation in your school library collection?
Over the last two years we have been genrefying the collection, and evaluation has occured as books have been genrefied. The outcomes were based on age, circulation stats for the resource, and condition. At the end of last year I reviwed the junior non fiction collcection and determined that it needed updating. This was based on the condition of the books I observed as I moved them from one location to another, and the knowledge that this is one of the most highly borrowed collections in the library. Other than this, there are currently no priority areas for evaluation in my school library collection. This is an area I need to work to improve.