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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.
Unless you happen to possess luck on a superhuman scale, bad data will lead to bad decisions. Alas, the situation is not symmetrical: good data may or may not lead to good decisions. Good data can be corrupted in context — by the misinterpreter, by the inattentive, by the intrusion of luck of the bleakest kind. The publishing business operates with data that no self-respecting industry would tolerate (can you imagine an executive at Exxon Mobil not knowing how many cars are on the road, how many miles they drive, and how much gasoline they consume?), and within publishing, book publishers have the worst of it, with no hard evidence about who actually purchases and uses their products, assuming they are purchased and used and not simply accessed on a pirate site somewhere or, in their print form, simply serving to dress up a furniture store.
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On October 17th, 1989, the Oakland A’s were playing the San Francisco Giants in the World Series, but just as the game was kicking off—the television broadcast cut out. When the signal came back, it was no longer the baseball game. These were the early minutes of the Loma Prieta earthquake, which struck near Santa
“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.”
Academic libraries have historically avoided collecting textbooks, for several reasons. Perhaps the most important are these:
Philosophical: Academic libraries tend to see themselves primarily as supporters of research, and classroom texts are not research materials.
Practical: Library collections (and collecting practices) have their origins in the print era, when housing and managing a comprehensive textbook collection would have been a daunting challenge, both fiscally and logistically.
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