Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Bob Nardini, continuing on from yesterday’s post which can be found here. Bob is Vice President, Library Services at ProQuest Books. In 1985, a few years out of library school at the University of Toronto, he began to work in academic bookselling and has been involved with library book collections ever since. Bob is based in ProQuest’s office in La Vergne, Tennessee, outside of Nashville.

Sustainability
If librarians had largely moved on, if patrons were oblivious, and faculty quieted years ago, this didn’t mean the end of debate over book selection, one never wholly owned by librarians. Another participant, from the start of approval plans in the 1960s, had been booksellers, who advocated for approval plans not only in their sales calls, but often in the library literature and at conferences.

“Last month the library announced a startling change in plans for the acquisition of books,” reported Robert Zaretsky, professor of world cultures and literatures at the University of Houston, to readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education in May 2018. “Instead of ordering books by anticipating faculty and student needs,” he wrote, “the library will adopt an increasingly popular strategy known as ‘patron driven’ acquisition.’” This news, Zaretsky said, sent “a chill across campus.”

Actually, the chill didn’t reach across the entire Houston campus.  What he meant were the university’s humanities departments, where for years as university administrators “relentlessly bled their libraries,” he and his colleagues from ever-chillier offices watched university money flow away from what he called “Humanitiestan” and toward “STEMistan.”