Unit 2: How To Disintermediate The Department of Redundancy Department

Beach, R., & Dial, M. (January 01, 2006). Building a collection development CMS on a shoe-string. Library Hi Tech, 24, 1, 115-125.

This article discusses the implementation of a collection development framework with a content management system (CMS) at a small (5,000 students) college library. The article is written by those that developed and implemented this system and is very practical as it is a report of "real world" problems, although the article ends with the future of this model at this institution in doubt.

The new system was an experiment in addressing faculty and student concerns as to the responsiveness of the library in purchasing faculty-requested materials and the paucity of the collection in terms of student needs. The article highlights the growing phenomenon of distance-learning and makes clear that in the future planners might do well to imagine every student to be a "distance learner." Doing this facilitates integration of campus (and beyond) computer networks and enhances the library experience of those students in residence as much as those at a distance.

The article addresses the challenges in modeling a collection development content management system that has buy-in from stakeholders, who are library staff, faculty and students. Faculty requests for materials to be purchased by the library are seen as the beginning of a process that, in the past, required many replicated tasks related to bibliographic data such as Baker & Taylor order forms and MARC records. The goal of the integration described by Beach and Dial is to utilize the initial request for purchase of materials by faculty as the basis for a record that is then further enhanced by the library's technical services department and, upon final purchase and accession, then becomes the catalog record.

Utilizing a CMS to enhance collection development (at this small college, at the time of this article's publication) for the small college in Texas that Beach and Dial describe is still in the experimental stages. The article notes that buy-in from faculty must be facilitated by outreach on the part of librarians and is absolutely critical to the success of this proposal. Faculty must know how and desire to use this new way of making materials requests.

Of interest also in this article is the point made by the authors that due to budget constraints and limited purchasing the year of the system's trial implementation, this created an opportunity to test the new idea in a less frenetic environment. Also, I found interesting that Beach and Dial note the reluctance of technical services staff to give up their paper processes, even though these older patterns of library acquisition were/are quite redundant and known to be so by the very people performing this redundant work.