Week 1: The journey begins

This week class began; the blog begins as well.

I had been watching Dr. Mon's blog and knew we had to choose an area and a group for our work. I was torn on this; I do reference work at work, so that I need less practice with. I am taking Dr. Chavez-Hernadez's Collection Development class this semester, and Helen (my mentor and the librarian at work) and I try to do some collection development there. We both read Library Journal and pick out things we think would be read--generally more popular works, like Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.

I have a huge gripe with the (tiny) fiction collection at work (it is a community college, so fiction is not a huge part of the mission statement.) The collection is almost completely Middle Everything--white bread, hardback romances, realistic fiction, with a few mysteries thrown in. I am not a fan of realistic fiction. In that library, we hope to add more variety to the purchasing--science fiction is probably going too far, but to have SOME minority writers, some variety of any sort would be an improvement.

So when I start this semester, this problem will be on my mind. What are the holes in the collection? How can we reach more readers, how can we interest more people? I volunteered to be the Team Leader for Collections, mostly because no one else spoke up. I hope that after the nightmare of group work in the spring semester, where one person quit our group, I will be able to do ANYTHING! Maybe not.

This week I assigned myself the task of looking around the IPL, getting familiar with what is there. I know that when I looked at the Knitting section of the IPL there was only ONE entry! That must be improved!