Internship Journal, Week 1: August 27 & 29
02 September 2024
Ever since the overcoming the inordinately underestimated mound of work that LIBS 658 posed, one of the wrinkles that increasingly bugged me as time went on was how little collections, the defining, foundational aspect of libraries, seemed to be disproportionately underemphasized in (public) library work. Future courses in the program? Well, yeah, but nothing beyond “here are some places to find materials to consider adding to your collection” or “here is how to evaluate what the collection might be like for [insert identity here],” and other repeated, interchangeable advice. Colleagues working in patron-facing branches alongside me? Never seen a single coworker show even the most marginal of interest of managing the collection while working there. It all felt as if everyone was missing an essential frame to view public libraries that was, like, two feet away.
Of course, the obvious culprit here is the profound transformation of libraries from primarily quiet receptacles of books and information to de facto community centers over the past couple decades. But, the kind of position I’d like out of the gate, usually titled a variation of “information services librarian” or something similar, generally includes cataloging and suggesting, if not outright ordering, materials. So, in perhaps an uncharacteristic fixation on what might be a footnote in my early career, I decided my internship would be at the Collections Services department at Central Rappahannock Regional Library (CRRL). My internship schedule revolves around my hours at a front-facing branch, which makes it feel a lot more squeezed in than the rest of grad school is: three hours after my scheduled shift on Wednesdays, and pretty much the entire eight-hour workday on Friday.
As expected, this first week was getting oriented to the central office, along with a bevy of new and known faces that may or may not match their email pictures. My internship supervisor, who shall henceforth to be referred to as the Prince for both confidentiality and affirmative amusement1, has managed to spring between all but one of the major pillars of library land, going from school libraries to academic libraries to public libraries over his career. A lengthy record in education is expected as the selector of juvenile and young adult materials for the entire system—any and all books written for underage audiences, whether suggested by a patron or a librarian working in the system must pass under his judgment. That includes the perhaps unconventional choices I might end up suggesting, and probably one of the most recurring duties throughout this arrangement will be putting together carts2 of potential additions for him to evaluate.
Not just recurring, but pretty much the very first: on Friday, after a short discussion about some questions I had poised prior, we dove right into the Prince's process for ordering new books for the system. As part of the greater Washington metropolitan area made of the municipalities in Virginia and Maryland surrounding Washington DC, CRRL's service area is experiencing the same population growth and subsequent diversification as the rest of the region, a population that would benefit from an increasingly diverse collection. For all the directions that can be taken for this, there's a very banal constraint limiting any new pursuits: money. In 2022's fiscal year, CRRL's budget for materials selection totaled $1.3 million (Breeding, 2023), servicable for keeping up with longstanding demands, but not enough to make sure each and every group in the system can have a pocket of the collection catered to them.3.
That makes for some very utilitarian decision-making, and the Prince laid out all the calculations buzzing in the back of his head as he picks what books will hit the system two months from now. Ordered as I remember them, some of the concerns he laid out include: is the book from a long-running, popular series? Do we have books by the author that have circ'ed a lot in the past? If it isn't necessarily going to be popular, will it fill a niche in the collection? Can we even afford to fill that niche? What do industry reviewers say about the book? What audience/age group is a book intended for? Is there any content in the book that might necessitate bumping it up into YA or adult? What warehouse is the book coming from, and how will it affect processing? How will a given book be cataloged, and how will it be placed in the collection? Will it need a genre or holiday sticker? On and on and on. Probably the most bemusing occurrence not long into things was realizing lo and behold—some of that repeated, interchangeable advice turned out to be exactly the kind same guidance that the Prince personally emphasized to me.
Anyway, after a couple hours of watching, I was let loose to give selection a try myself. There are two platforms that physical books are primarily selected and ordered from: ipage and Title Source 360, owned and operated by Ingram and Baker & Taylor respectively. Apparently, this duo of vendors have been in the business for so long that they're the default (if not contractually-mandated?) options for ordering books at some systems. (The fact that books seem to be sold to libraries for literally half the retail price probably has a lot to do with that, naturally.) I had actually known ipage was the standard library-book-ordering software for some time now, so I had been looking forward to the opportunity of actually getting experience with it for myself.
And there was plenty of experience to have this first day—the Prince informed me that it took him around 5 hours to build his first cart, and 5 hours was about the time it took for me to make mine. Pushing up the target date by a week, I was tasked with going through the list of "high-interest" releases in Title Source 360, look over each of the 30-something books that were listed there, determine if it belongs in the system and if so, identify how to classify it and how many copies to be ordered in ipage. Some books were trivial to pick thanks to their sheer popularity—10 copies of the new Wimpy Kid went straight to juvenile fiction, no deliberation required. Other books, like, say, a picture book about a Palestinian-American girl contending with the geographic erasure of her motherland by two totally fresh-faced authors, took a little bit of weighing audience interest versus timeliness versus controversy. There were very few books put on that cart or omitted without at least a few minutes of deliberation and researching, if reading reviews and blurbs and alt-tabbing through Horizon and Bibliocommons to number crunch counts as research.
In total, my first cart comprised 120-something units of about 25 books, costing about $2,000 retail. Working at CRRL for two years now, I've grown substantially acquainted with the collection through the hundreds of books passing through my hands in-branch most days of the week, alongside sifting through their digital records and retrieving circulation statistics for coursework. And yet, trying to cross-reference each author with the circ stats of their books or how much pull their awards might have or what else the system might have or other methods made it very obvious how much I don't know about CRRL's collection to effectively select for it. I think I did a good enough job for this first attempt—though whether it really is good remains to be evaluated by the Prince 'till next Wednesday.
1 ^If you're reading this in the future: trust me, this is the best way for me to not take things completely seriously.
2 ^"Cart" in this case meaning a list of items in an order. Which is literally how online shopping works, but the terminology gets kind of muddled both when one thinks of a library cart and when vendors are trying to evoke the exact same image while ordering.
3 ^For reference, Prince William, the county directly to the north of Stafford, CRRL's northernmost locality, has a materials budget of $2.2 million (Breeding, 2024), almost double that of CRRL's. I doubt this gives them much more leeway, though.
References
Breeding, M. (2023, November 7) Statistics published by IMLS for Central Rappahannock Regional Library System. libraries.org. Retrieved September 2, 2024, from: https://librarytechnology.org/libraries/imls/30081
Breeding, M. (2024, August 2) Statistics published by IMLS for Prince William Public Libraries. libraries.org. Retrieved September 2, 2024, from: https://librarytechnology.org/libraries/imls/1720