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September 15, 2003
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Collections
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THE LIBRARIES AND THEIR COLLECTIONS The Libraries of The Claremont Colleges build and maintain collections in many formats to support learning, teaching, and research at The Colleges. Building collections is fundamental to "tying our academic community to varied cultural and scholarly traditions" (Libraries' Mission Statement). A center for intellectual life at The Colleges, the Libraries preserve and make available recorded knowledge and scholarship. As learning and teaching at The Colleges have evolved, so the Libraries have grown to meet the needs of the students and faculty. Before the library operating agreement (Exhibit C1), signed by each of The Colleges in 1971, separate college and departmental libraries developed collections to serve their own campuses with some library functions centralized. For example, materials in all collections were represented in one library catalog, all ordering and cataloging was done centrally, and Honnold Library was devoted to providing service to all. One significant result of the 1971 agreement was a coordinated collection development effort, which led to written collection development policies for each discipline. Collection building and management are processes with multiple dimensions that make the development of an outstanding collection significantly more complex today than in 1971. In addition, the Libraries' ability to provide relevant, coordinated collections is challenged by the unique structure of The Claremont Colleges. Each institution has expectations for support of its curriculum that can conflict with expectations of the others. For example, psychology is taught as a social science by some of the schools and as a science by others. Although undergraduates make up the largest portion of our student population, faculty, graduate students, and even advanced undergraduates expect the Libraries to provide resources at a depth and breadth comparable to that of other, larger institutions that support graduate programs. One of our goals is to enhance communication and establish effective collaboration with our user community in order to develop library collections that, at a minimum, satisfy core curricular needs. Collection development at the Libraries of The Claremont Colleges offers many areas for reflection and reassessment. In this essay we have chosen to focus on three that are of particular concern to us now. The first is our ability to develop adequate collections in appropriate formats that support and reflect changes in each college's curriculum and that are comparable to those of other libraries that support premier undergraduate and graduate programs. We are concerned both because increases to our materials budget are not keeping up with inflationary rises in materials costs and because The Colleges make curriculum changes, including the addition of new academic programs, without communicating with the Libraries about the ability of our collections to support teaching and research in new areas. A second concern is the need to acquire, house, and preserve traditional collections and, at the same time, acquire and manage materials in new and evolving formats. Finally, we have many hidden collections--uncataloged or under-cataloged--which require processing so that they may be discovered by and available to researchers. |