Every Monday the library staff and a variety of professors approach the library with bated breath and a special spring in their step, excited for the new shipment of books arriving to augment Hillsdale College’s Mossey Library’s growing collection.
“Collecting for the library is really fun. We get a shipment every Monday, and every Monday is like Christmas,” Library Director Dan Knoch said. “We even have professors stop by on Mondays and ask because they want to know whether the new shipment arrived.”
Each year, the library purchases approximately 5,000 books to add to its collection, in addition to the frequent gifts of collections and selections of books, the corpus is constantly growing. The collection keeps up no works from dissertations to children’s book to media resources, such as CD’s and DVD’s.
The effort to maintain the necessary material for the college is spearheaded by Technical Service Librarian Maurine McCourry, guided by the suggestions of professors, other librarians, catalogues, and students.
“Our first priority is the books that faculty suggest,” McCourry said. “They mostly suggest books for the curriculum but often books for their research as well or to support the research of their students.”
The library has a link set up on the catalouge website for professors and students to recommend books, and they use various review publications, such as “Choice,” to keep track of new influential books and scholarly materials.
The library staff as a whole follows the publishing and scholarly review publications to choose materials.
“We rely on faculty suggestions a lot, but the library staff reads reviews on a regular basis and we select from what we know about the curriculum and what we read in reviews. We also ask the students for recommendations,” McCourry said.
Maintaining the collection is a constant effort, as they must continue ordering books, stay within the budget, but also make the budget last for the whole year. McCourry said they aim not to overspend their budget while using as much on books as possible.
“I had the acquisitions and cataloging job up until 2000. It’s a great job – I loved it,” Knoch said. “Oftentimes suggestions are very esoteric and specific to a field, and you have to ask whether the library needs it, but ultimately the answer is yes. Sometimes we wait until after a few suggestions before we purchase things, but generally we get what the professors recommend. They are the experts in their fields.”
Knoch is in charge of the gifts given to the library, and sorts which books can be kept and which are either not applicable, un-needed, or not in good enough condition to be added to the collection. What doesn’t get added to the collection is put on the free books table.
“Duplicates, a lot of paperbacks, or books that aren’t in good enough condition aren’t kept,” he said. “One of the biggest issues is smelly books. We can’t put books in the collection which aren’t stored well because they can smell like mold or mildew.”
While sorting books, both the gifts and for purchase, the librarians bear in mind what books could use more copies and which regularly are used by students and faculty.
“We look at Inter-Library Loan a lot to see if there are any we think we should add to the collection,” McCourry said. “And we use the same processes for DVDs. We don’t read as many reviews on media materials, but we take a lot of input from the college community and try to keep stocked the films of Oscar winners and those being discussed a lot.”
Not all of the works that the community suggests are ordered, but those that fall beyond the budget are often put off to the next year.
“The basic criterion we have is that they support the curriculum, and there have been very few when they don’t fit this,” she said. “Our recommenders have very good taste.”
