Musings of an Academic Librarian

Libraries are organic in the sense that they are constantly growing and changing.  Books get too old or damaged and get weeded (or go missing!) and new titles are bought or new editions of books the library already has.  It is the same for the college library.  Lots of books have gone missing over the years (hopefully very few more with the new security gates) and books have gone out of date.  The collection needs to be constantly updated. Because of my interest in collection development I realised that I am having a hand in reshaping the monograph collection and that is very pleasing to me.  For instance, since I have started reading picture books to my son I have become really interested in young children's literature and so I have been choosing some new titles for the library (bearing in mind we are trying to promote te reo in centres so I have been choosing mostly English-Maori books).  It's not just children's books.  Where I have seen a need fo...

In any library it's important to have subject headings that are very specific for books and other resources so that patrons can more easily find what they are looking for.  For example, books on RIE (Resources for Infant Educarers) are very popular in the library where I work.  Often students will come in and ask for books on RIE and at first I didn't know what they meant.  Then once I knew I decided it would be a good idea to add RIE as a subject term for all the books that cover this teaching approach  (the other terms being used were very generic Library of Congress subject headings, e.g. Child care).  Now when you type in RIE as a keyword into the catalogue search box, all the books on RIE come up.  If RIE wasn't a subject term, then these books would only appear in the search results if RIE was mentioned somewhere in the catalogue record of the book, e.g. the abstract.