2015 Charleston Library Conference

Most, if not all, academic collections librarians are experiencing or have experienced the need to adjust their spending and collections activities to adhere to decreasing funds and resources as publisher prices increase, the value of the dollar fluctuates, and library budgets remain unchanged. If you are a collections librarian, however, and you have a vested interest in maintaining the strength of your valued collections despite the decreased funds available to ideally maintain them, you’re probably also searching for ways to make every dollar count. 

Knowing the strength of your collections, as well as the strength of the collections of other libraries, is a great way to determine the best way to spend collections budgets: strengthen our weaker areas, and maintain our strong areas. Given that tools designed for cross-institutional overlap projects can be expensive, I’ve been looking at ways to use some of the unique features of the tools we own to run effective analyses. I’ve also been looking to free, open source resources to use in this project. I started “small,” with an analysis of our holdings in Postcolonial Studies, and am now treading the deep waters of our very large, grant-winning, and nationally and internationally recognized Irish Studies collection. 

In June of 2015, I presented my Postcolonial findings at the annual conference of the Atlantic Provinces Library Association (APLA). By November, I will have completed my analysis of our Irish Studies collection, and I would like to present these findings at this year's Charleston Conference.