Leisure reading collections in the academic library – ACRLog

By Hailley Fargo, Posted on December 3, 2018

Here’s my honest opinion: I wasn’t a big fan of collection development during graduate school. When I was supervising the residence halls libraries at Illinois, putting new books in my virtual cart was always at the bottom of my to-do list.

I didn’t have a good system of finding new books and once I found something cool, usually one of my colleagues had it in their cart. For me, I was always more interested in using my time to support the student employees or plan programming with residence life than I was in spending my time building a collection.

The work of collection development felt like a chore. Needless to say I was jazzed when I started at Penn State and had zero collection development responsibilities. I could go back to just me requesting the books for myself I heard about on podcasts or read in the many email newsletters I subscribed to.

I “escaped” collection development for two years and this fall, the Leisure Reading collection in the Pattee & Paterno Libraries fell on to my plate of responsibilities.

Source: Leisure reading collections in the academic library – ACRLog