Knowledge Resources Discussion #4: Collection Planning
12 November 2023
For this discussion, you will be researching and sharing information on what collection planning looks like in the type of library you have been focusing on (school, academic, public, special).
For this discussion, you should first do a literature search on the topic of "collection planning" and the type of library you find interesting (school, academic, public, special, etc.). Select at least one article or other reputable resource that you find particularly useful and/or interesting. (You may branch out into search terms such as "collection development" or "collection management," but the focus of the resource should be on long-term improvement planning for an existing collection, not building an entirely new collection.)
You will then report here on your chosen source(s). Some questions you might consider in your report include: How much discussion of diversifying collections did you see? How well did they address community needs assessments/environmental scans?
While not necessarily describing an explicit collection plan, Assessment of Multilingual Collections in Public Libraries: A Case Study of the Toronto Public Library (2018) by Valentina Ly in the journal Evidence Based Library and Information Practice uses relevant methods employed in a collection plan to describe an existing collection. As one of the largest and most multicultural cities in the world, with a total population of 2,794,356 people and 46.6% comprised of immigrants (Statistics Canda, 2023), Toronto boasts an equally massive public library system to support it. According to current data, the Toronto Public Library (TPL) circulates 10.2 million items across a whole 100 branches in over 307 languages (City of Toronto, n.d.). However, despite the system's wide umbrella, Ly finds that TPL "falls short of having a language collection that is proportional to the languages spoken within the community" (p. 18).
Ly's process in coming to this conclusion is rooted in a needs assessment of the city population: using 2016 census data, Ly collected and ranked the most commonly spoken foreign languages in Toronto corresponding to those officially supported by TPL, then compared this data to the number of physical foreign language materials in the system. As English and French are the two official and most-spoken languages in Canada, these items enjoyed 82.74% and 5.83% of the collection for 50.88% and 1.31% of mother tongue speakers, respectively (Table 2). Ly also calculated the items per capita, in case for mother tongue speakers, "which is the [number of items] available in that language, divided by the number of respondents with that mother tongue" (p. 22); and found the mean item per mother tongue speaker to be 0.17. The number of formats a given item could be found in was similarly dominated by English and French, though with wider support: there were on average 15.53 formats available for each of Toronto's 17 most spoken languages with a range of 8 to 26 formats (Table 3).
Despite the TPL's shortcomings, Ly remained certain that the TPL can still "serve as a model library for other institutions through their [foreign language] collection development strategies." While there is an assumption that "if [a] library is responding to community demographics, then there should be equitable representation of the linguistic diversity in the collection as there is in the population," Ly notes that this is generally not feasible, given that the goals of collection development have shifted to "meeting the needs of the user groups within the given constraints" (p. 26). Since staff with fluency or knowledge to properly pursue collection development for foreign languages are still scarce in public libraries, this will likely ring true for many systems. Ly concluded that it might be better "to follow the example of the TPL [foreign language] collection, rather than to pursue an equally representative collection" (p. 29). As my collection plan is focusing on improving the foreign-language offerings at my current system, with approximately 12% of the total population primarily speaking a foreign language at home yet less than 1% of the collection comprised of foreign language items, the prospect of bringing it up to par with the demographic ratios would take much more resources than the system has, even over longer periods of time than three years. That said, I find Ly's findings and conclusions to be a useful axis to orient around, and will be using their research to consider what ratios might be feasible for my final plan.
Bonus overlong reply to a post about comics in school libraries
This was an interesting read, if only because as someone who's been consuming comics of all kinds since forever, reading the efforts of folks unfamiliar with comics try to gauge their audience never fails to evoke the mental image a labcoat-wearing person distantly observing people with a magnifying glass going about their average everyday reading, haha. I sound incredibly flippant here, but with the number of secondary school educators I've met or seen online in so-called "nerdy" communities around or adjacent to comics, I'd figured the collective guard about comics in schools would have been lowered by now. I guess it hasn't spread into school libraries just yet, but this would probably be based on state/location.
Anyway. There are a couple aspects of this article that I can speak to from personal, not-very-academic experience. Becnel & Moeller (2020) touch on how many censorship cards have been stacked against comics since the beginning and the need for the Comics Code Authority and Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, but as they note later on the pile hasn't gotten any smaller (it should be noted while I am a comics liker, I'm not a Comics Person Who Knows the History), and depending on your circumstances they get significantly bigger when it comes to manga. There's way too much cultural baggage that would take an entire class to barely touch the surface, but there's a critical blog post that I like to reference when it comes to Japanese culture:
People use Japan as a handwavey scapegoat as a result of a background culture of “wacky Japan” jokes and growing up joking about Japanese video games. They also use it as a catch-all marker of reactionary sentiment partially in reaction to the supposed popularity of anime amongst the resurgent online right wing. The problem with all this is that it almost invariably extends beyond the media itself or even the (deserving) targets of mockery that this stuff is meant to lampoon. [...] What arises is a kneejerk response to anything appearing to be of Japanese aesthetic sensibilities and a strange defensive environment where things are on some level expected to be enjoyed in spite of their country of origin. When Japanese media is reactionary, it is said to be a representation of a whole culture, when it isn’t it is said to be a surprising break from it and thus, no matter what, the discussion ends up at the supposed inherent backwards reactionary nature of Japanese popular culture (Ashley Y., 2018).However! While I won't go so far to say any school library that excludes manga isn't necessarily engaging it censorship, they are missing out on an important tradition in the genre, especially considering that comics popularity in modern pop culture owes a ton to manga, along with its Korean equivalent manhwa. I will go as far to say that say that comics are actually seeing a nuclear explosion because of the relatively recent popularity of the webtoon format which is optimized for smartphones. Even western webtoons are seeing enough success that they've been getting print releases, the most popular example being Lore Olympus.
All of this to say that yeah, school librarians should go ahead and order those comics anyway, community response be damned, because the kids want to read them if they aren't already, and their libraries will probably get more foot traffic if they do.
References
Ashley Y. (2018, October 20). Japan is a place on Earth. Timber Owls. Retrieved November 12, 2023, from: https://timberowlscom.wordpress.com/2018/10/20/japan-is-a-place-on-earth/
Becnel, K., & Moeller, R.A. (2020, January). “I’m conflicted about my shelf of censorship”: High school library graphic novel collection development in North Carolina, USA. School Libraries Worldwide, 26(1), 124-135. https://doi.org/10.29173/slw8252
City of Toronto. (n.d.). Toronto Public Library. Retrieved November 12, 2023, from: https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/accountability-operations-customer-service/city-administration/city-managers-office/agencies-corporations/agencies/toronto-public-library/
Ly, V. (2018). Assessment of multilingual collections in public libraries: A case study of the Toronto Public Library. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 13(3), 17–31. https://doi.org/10.18438/eblip29408
Statistics Canada. (2023). Census profile, 2021 census of population. Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 98-316-X2021001. Retrieved November 12, 2023, from: https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/dp-pd/prof/index.cfm?Lang=E