I work at a public library. I have a Masters Degree in Library Science (Univ. of KY, 1991) , and worked for several years as a Reference Librarian before moving into the IT side of things. I also supervise our library’s “technical services department”, the department that orders, receives, processes and catalogs most of what we buy. We spend well over a million dollars a year on materials. We’re not “small”, but we aren’t huge either. We’re in the top 10-15 range for public libraries in Ohio, and Ohio libraries are the envy of most of the nation in terms of funding.

I haven’t written much yet about libraries and librarianship here yet, but one issue that is stuck in my crawl lately is how reliant public libraries are on a magazine called Library Journal. We’ve been running reports on circulation (”checkout”) rates for large swaths of our collection. One thing that is immediately evident is that a disturbing portion of books purchased largely on the basis of positive reviews in LJ do not circulate at a rate that justifies their purchase. For example, I ran a report listing items added to the collection prior to 12/1/2005 that had circulated less than twice. The dollar value of those titles staggered me, and a cursory review of the titles revealed many possible LJ -review books.

I know that there is some library science literature on this issue and I intend to review it as soon as I have time.

I think the Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 themes in vogue are interesting. I also think insufficient attention is given to public library spending choices, collection development patterns, processing and ordering efficiency, and many other age-old back-end library issues. I hope to write more about these issues in future posts.