Before you dive into creating or updating a collection development policy or purchasing any resources, you need to get the lay of the land. You should understand the ecosystem of your library, know your patron base, and identify institutional needs and priorities. All of these factors will influence your collection policies and decision-making.

Language To Know

Throughout your work and this ebook there are foundational collections terminology. Core terms include:

• Approval Plans
• Standing Orders (can be also be called a blanket order)
• Slips
• Acquisition Platforms

Library Ecosystem

Budget and Approvals Structure

Familiarize yourself with your…

• Budget
  • How is your library’s collection budget structured and how does that fit within the overall budget for your library?
    • Your overall library budget is commonly divided into operations, salaries, equipment, and collections. See the Budget and Planning chapter [link] for more information.
  • What is your budget for…
    • Purchases
      • Approval plan
      • Firm orders/one time purchases
      • Standing orders
    • Subscriptions
      • Content types in subscriptions can include: journals, ebooks, streaming media, and databases.
      • Subscriptions can be to individual items or in “packages” which include multiple resources.
• Authorization structure
  • Who approves expenditures for orders?
    • There may be different people or departments who can authorize different types and sizes of budgetary expenditures.
      • For example, some libraries will allow individual selectors to submit orders up to a certain dollar amount with no additional approvals.
  • Who is authorized to sign licenses for subscription products?
  • What documentation is needed to place orders?
    • What order forms exist? Do they differ depending on the type or format of the resource?
    • To complete order documentation do you need to know specific fund code, location code, or action codes for adding editions/formats, specifying a print book location, placing a rush order, adding a duplicate copy, etc.?
• Recommendation Policies and Procedures
  • What are the library’s expectations for whether and/or how you should communicate with patrons placing purchase requests, in addition to other library departments (e.g., acquisitions department, liaison department)?
  • How do interdisciplinary requests get triaged?
  • You may also have a patron-driven acquisition (PDA) or Evidence-Based Acquisitions (EBA) plan that can help you determine which ebooks your patrons are interested in reading.
• Timelines
  • What is your fiscal year?
  • What are your monthly and annual timelines for ordering?
  • Are there expectations for spending your entire allocated budget by a specific time, or are there milestones you need to meet?
  • When do other people need to be looped in?
    • Do other people need to place orders in acquisitions systems for specialty formats like streaming media?
    • Who signs your licenses?
    • Who negotiates pricing?
    • Who sets up e-resource authentication?

Library Systems

How you purchase materials will impact every aspect of your job as a collection management librarian. The systems and vendors that your library uses to purchase, subscribe, and collect information on your holdings all impact what you can buy. You should become knowledgeable about:

• The Integrated Library System used at your institution and its functionality, such as:
  • The ability to load records manually from small publishers.
  • The electronic resource management software used by the ILS.
    • Including which health sciences publishers are included in it
• The limitations of your institution’s acquisitions platform such as which health sciences publishers are represented on the platform.
• Which formats your library prefers and can catalog/put on the shelf (e.g., electronic, print, spiral bound, pocket).
• What workflows and documentation your library vendors use for ordering materials. For example, do you purchase firm orders…
  • on an acquisitions platform (e.g., GOBI, Matthews Book Company, or R2)?
  • through spreadsheets and separate invoices (e.g., OVID)?
  • through an annual frontlist (e.g., American Academy of Pediatrics)?

Vendors

Working with vendors is a core responsibility of a collections librarian. It is important to cultivate a productive and professional working relationship. Ideally, you will work as a team to get the materials your patrons want at a price your library can afford. The chapter on managing relationships with vendors goes into more detail about these relationships.

Understand Your Audience and Institutional/Organizational Needs

Before you can begin selecting resources, it is important to understand your audience. Below are some factors you may want to consider as you learn about how to support your institution/organization.

Who is part of your local community?

• Have you looked at your region’s local health statistics?
  • What are the top diseases in your state?
• What consumer health needs do your patrons have?
  • Is consumer-level health information requested often?
  • What languages are predominantly spoken in your area?
  • What formats are needed to make health information accessible to your local community (e.g., large font books, talking books, braille)?

What research is happening at your institution/organization?

• What does your institution/organization’s website say about its current research focus?
  • Tip: Join your organization’s email lists for news alerts to stay up to date on the latest research.
  • Tip: Bookmark relevant websites and check them on a regular schedule.
• What research centers or institutes are on your campus?
• Which research projects at your organization receive grant funding?
  • Tip: Search NIH RePORTER by organization.

What areas need to be supported at your hospital?

• What clinical services/procedures/specialties does your hospital/system offer?
• Do you need to support residencies?
  • If yes, in what fields? For example – medicine, surgery, pharmacy, nursing, chaplaincy, etc.
    • Tip: Residency support may require specific clinical/practice resources, but also teaching resources, such as medical or nursing education journals and texts.
• For nursing, do you need to support Magnet or the Pathway to Excellence Program (PTEP)?
  • Tip: Nursing excellence programs like Magnet and PTEP may require collecting resources in evidence-based practice, nursing research, nursing leadership and administration, and nursing theory.
• What are your hospital administration and/or business office’s needs?
  • Tip: Titles on business and innovation in healthcare are key to supporting the mission of healthcare organizations.
    • Administrators may rely on titles such as Harvard Business Review.
    • The acceleration in healthcare innovation has also given rise to new published by major health sciences publishers, but not indexed in PubMed, such as NEJM Catalyst or NEJM AI. To stay current, subscribe to publisher alerts. publications by subscribing to publisher alerts

What academic programs should be supported at your institution?

• What schools and departments are part of your institution?
  • What are the initiatives or priorities of the academic programs? Is there a focus on interprofessional education?
• Does your library have value, priorities, or considerations to consider for collection development (e.g., open and enduring access to information; diversity, equity, and inclusion; economic sustainability)?
• What courses are offered that the library can support?
  • Tip: Are you able to attend Curriculum Council meetings or can you view course syllabi?

What Should You Buy?

Hopefully you have a collection development policy that lays out the foundations of what your library collects. Knowing the call number ranges, topics, and programs/patrons served by your existing collection is essential for understanding the collection so you can grow or evolve it appropriately. It is also important to know what formats your library prefers (e.g., print, electronic, streaming media) to help you keep within existing structures for cataloging and acquisitions.

Even with a collection development policy, it is important to maintain flexibility. Situations may arise where you are asked to subscribe to something outside your policy’s parameters. Exploring the request may be helpful if it might benefit the library from an organizational perspective. You need to understand your library’s position in your organization and internal and external stakeholder politics, which could add new context to your decision-making. Remember that you are not required to honor all resource recommendations, but you should be mindful of the impact of saying “no.” In some cases, perhaps you can offer alternatives.

For additional discussion of collection management strategies, see the chapter Evaluating Resources: Deciding What to Buy, Keep, Weed, or Cancel.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) in Your Collection

When purchasing or subscribing to content for your library’s collection, it is important to keep DEIA in mind. Your collection development policy may provide guidelines on how to select DEIA-related materials. You may want to set aside time to consider how you can ensure that you are selecting content that will support historically underserved groups. Review the Medical Library Association Collection Development Caucus’s list of collections-related DEIA-related projects and resources to get started.

Below are questions to consider for your material selection process when looking for new resources.

• Which DEIA-related subject areas are of interest to your community?
  • Create a well-defined list of topics to collect (that can evolve as needed) for consistency.
  • What books and journals are being requested through ILL? This can illuminate a gap in the collection or niche materials not covered by your book approval plan.
• How can you formally integrate DEIA considerations into your resource selection process?
  • For example, if you have an approval plan or if you receive alerts for new w/books, is it possible to adjust your criteria to ensure you are including DEIA-related titles?
• Does it make sense to explore different types of content (e.g., memoirs, graphic medicine), different platforms (e.g., Overdrive), or content from smaller or non-traditional publishers or university presses to bring a broader perspective to your collection?
• If applicable, have you or your library’s liaison librarians reached out to the diversity officers or committees at your organization to see if they have suggestions for books, journals, or other resources that support their school’s/organization’s DEIA mission, values, and objectives?

Keeping Up With New Resources

Keeping up with new resources is challenging, especially if you are new to collections. There are many vendors and platforms to know about, and potential purchases and subscriptions to consider. Knowing everything that might be relevant to your institution and patrons is a lot of work and develops over time. However, there are strategies to manage the information overload and efficiently stay aware of new resources.

Tracking

Regardless of how you find new resources, tracking them is essential.

This can look like:

• Adding a star to bookmark important emails, although be wary of accumulating too many.
• Keeping a spreadsheet of current and potential purchases and subscriptions.
• Creating a folder on book acquisition platforms (e.g., GOBI) for items under consideration.

However you do it, it is essential to keep note of who (if anyone) recommended it, its price, format, specific contract terms such as multi-year agreements and renewal increases, and where it is available.

General Strategies

There are some overarching strategies you can use to keep up with new resources:

• Cultivate relationships with disciplinary faculty so they contact you when they see a new resource in their subject area.
• Have a purchase request form available on your library’s website.
• Proactively work with your vendor to get updates on new and in-development products.
• Sign up for vendor email lists. This is often the most efficient way to learn about new resources, but it may mean sorting through a lot of emails weekly.

Vendor communications can quickly become overwhelming. You can manage the deluge by:

• Working with your individual representative to manage how often they send emails to you, and asking them to limit their emails to certain products and resource types.
• Requesting that vendors send information updates or new product information via email and focus meetings on discussing renewals of existing products in your collection or timely needs.
• Setting up email inbox rules to funnel emails into folders for later review.
• Opting out of generic communication newsletters.

Books: Acquisition Platform Lists and Review Sites

Most acquisition platforms allow you to create a profile and set up notifications for new book titles. This may be through an approval plan or looking at topic lists.

Below are examples of acquisition platforms or subscription resources that provide new title lists. Many of these can be viewed for free and without an account, except where noted below with [$].

• Matthews’ New Receipts page: https://www.matthewsbooks.com/newreceipts.aspx
  • The Matthews Book Company webpage can be slow to load.
• Rittenhouse’s book catalog, which can be filtered to show newly released resources first for some categories: https://www.rittenhouse.com/rbd/Products/BrowseCategories.aspx
  • In Summer 2024 Rittenhouse ceased print acquisitions. They will maintain their R2 ebook platform. Their book catalog is reflective of new acquisitions.
• GOBI lists and slips/approval plans [$]
• Doody’s reviews [$]: https://www.doody.com/dej/
• You do not need a Doody’s subscription to access some of their lists, such as Doody’s Core Titles and Special Topics Lists. This information is available through book purchase platforms like GOBI and R2 Digital Library, if you subscribe to those resources.
  • Doody’s Special Topic Lists are useful for finding DEIA-focused health sciences books because the topics are often about underrepresented populations.

Not every new book will appear in the above resources — especially those from smaller and less-traditional publishers — and not all ebooks are available for libraries to purchase or subscribe to. For the latter, these are commonly due to publisher decisions such as:

• The ebooks are not available for individual purchase and are only available as part of a subscription package.
• The distribution model for an ebook is targeted at the individual consumer market and is not available for libraries to purchase on any platform.
• The ebook distribution model for institutions involves a lot of mediation and complex billing/access modalities (e.g., tokens) that make it untenable for your library to provide access.

Depending on your patron’s needs and your collection development policy, you may need to seek out print book catalogs or specific publishers to fill in the gaps for non-English language titles, titles published by small or boutique publishers, and self-published works. These additional resources may also be helpful for finding DEIA-related titles.

Journals

Keeping up with new journal publications can be more challenging. In addition to the general strategies listed above, it is helpful to look at interlibrary loan statistics annually to see which journals are being requested that you do not have access to.

Please note that some journals may not be available individually via a subscription, but may only be available as part of package deals. There are also cases where the price break for getting a package may benefit your budget. In these situations, you will need to weigh the cost of subscribing to a larger package with unneeded journals versus getting only the title(s) needed.

Databases, Streaming Media, and Other Electronic Resources

Keeping up with new databases, streaming media collections, and other electronic resources like point-of-care tools can be difficult. Start by using the subject areas defined in your collection development policy to guide which resources to explore.

Strategies to find new electronic resources, not including books and journals, include:

• Signing up for a review newsletter like The Charleston Advisor [$], Doody’s Review Service [$], or looking at reviews in the Journal of the Medical Libraries Association.
• Attending conferences and viewing vendor showcase presentations or participating in lunch-and-learns. These presentations often highlight new and upcoming resources.

Conferences

Conferences are a great way to learn about new products and meet with your current sales representatives. To maximize the benefits of a conference try to:

• Choose collections conferences like the Charleston Conference, or focus on collections-based sessions at the Medical Libraries Association (MLA) or Electronic Resources and Libraries (ER&L). See additional conferences in our professional development chapter.
• Attend vendor product showcase discussions or “Lunch and Learns.”
• Collect flyers on new resources and/or get your badge scanned by the booth representatives to be added to their email lists.
• Look at the conference program and see if there are networking opportunities to meet colleagues (e.g., Charleston Health Sciences Lively Lunch, MLA caucus luncheon).

Professional Webinars and Networking Opportunities

You can learn a lot of good information by attending webinars and networking opportunities focused on specific collection topics. At these events, attendees often recommend titles in niche areas that would be difficult to find through more traditional means. Join email lists such as the Medical Libraries Association Collection Development Caucus to build your professional network and find a community to discuss collections topics, trends, and issues.