1. LIB 610 Collection Management
Spring 2012
Needs
Assessment
in the
Media
Center

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Needs assessment?
What is needs assessment?
Needs assessment is about identifying the needs of
the local population, so that services can be planned
and delivered to meet those needs. Local needs
assessment will help to establish the extent and
nature of the drug problem in an area, describe the
socio-demographic profile of users and examine the
common referral routes. This will help build up a
picture of the needs of the population. Needs
assessment is an integral part of other strategic
initiatives, such as reducing waiting times.
• Effective Interventions Unit Guide to Needs
Assessment Summary
Needs Assessment

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A library-related definition
assessment
Quantitative and qualitative measurement of the
degree to which a library's collections, services, and
programs meet the needs of its users, usually
undertaken with the aim of improving
performance. Assessment is accomplished by
various methods, including direct observation,
analysis of feedback obtained through interviews,
user surveys, testing, etc. When conducted by the
library, rather than an outside agency, the process
is known as self-assessment. See also: Measurement,
Assessment, and Evaluation Section; outcomes
assessment; and quality of service.

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Needs Assessment in a school library?
What is needs assessment?
Needs assessment is the
process of collecting and analyzing information
that can then be used in decision making. It’s
likely that you’ll want to conduct needs
assessments in many areas of your program.
You can conduct a formal or informal needs
assessment.
• Library Media Program: Program Analysis

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Informal assessment
What’s an informal needs assessment?
Library media specialists are constantly doing
simple needs assessment when they identify a
problem, establish a goal, and develop a solution
to fill in the gap.
• What’s the situation? - Where are you now? What does
the situation (i.e., event, collection, staffing) look like?
• Where do I want to be? - Where do you want to be (i.e.,
successful event, quality collection, productive staff)?
• What’s the solution to fill the gap? - Where are the gaps
and the priorities? Is there a difference between where
you are and where you’d like to be?
– Library Media Program: Program Analysis

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Consider the age of the collection!
Age of materials important
In a small school library or a small public
library, materials are usually evaluated on their current
usefulness and their level of circulation. The mission of
such libraries is typically to provide up-to-date, popular
materials. Except for a few classics, books that no
longer reflect up-to-date facts or the current thinking
about a subject do not fit into the mission of such a
library. In most cases, books that have not circulated in
five years also may not fit the mission.
• Collection Assessment and the Collection Development Policy
Alternative Basic Library Education (ABLE)
Course 2: Collection Assessment

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Remembering the context
Curriculum
Clients
Community
 Carol L. Tilley, Syllabus for L595 Collection Analysis for School
Library Media Specialists (Web-Based Workshop)

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Collection Development Concerns
Criteria for concerns:
Content
Curricular correlation
Community
Cost and container
• Alice Yucht, Collection Development Concerns
republished from Teacher-Librarian, December
2000 in Alice in InfoLand

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Curricular
Concerns

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Curriculum and Collection
Curricular Correlation:
Does this material complement, enrich, and extend
the educational goals, philosophies, and curriculum
of the school and the district? Do you know what
new topics are being covered in your classrooms,
and do you have materials to support those
topics? Are you communicating with your teachers
about current and future resource requirements?
Don’t wait for the teachers to tell you what they will
need: sometimes they haven’t had time to think that
far ahead.
• Alice Yucht, Collection Development Concerns

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Curriculum mapping
curriculum mapping
Comparing the quality and quantity of
materials in a school library's collection with
the content of the school's curriculum at all
grade levels to reveal strengths and
weaknesses, facilitate collection development,
and identify areas that need weeding.

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Advice on curriculum mapping

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Step one in collection development


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A vital collection/curriculum link
No Child Left Behind
Beth Yoke, Executive Director,
Young Adult Library Association

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Library/Media Consultant

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What is the shelf list?
shelflist
A nonpublic catalog of a library collection
containing a single bibliographic record for each
item, filed in the order in which the items are
arranged on the shelf (usually by call number),
used for inventory because it contains the most
current information on copy and volume holdings.
Card shelflists are being phased out by libraries
that have converted their catalogs to machine-
readable records.

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What Is Resource Alignment?
There are six major steps in the resource alignment
process:
1. assessing library media center resources;
2. discarding materials no longer useful or supportive of
the curriculum;
3. identifying curriculum gaps in the remaining
resources;
4. preparing a prioritized list of needed curriculum
resources;
5. writing a three- to five-year resource development
plan to address present and projected resource needs;
6. defining a budgetary process to acquire the needed
resources.


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Sources for analysis?
Use the library software
Most library software programs have built-in
collection tools that measure the number of
books and average age of the collection by
Dewey classification. School libraries can also
export collection records to TitleWise, a free
collection analysis service provided by Follett
Library Products and Services.
• Kirsten L. Marie, “From theory to practice: a new
teacher-librarian tackles 1ibrary assessment.”
Teacher Librarian 33, no. 2 (2005).

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Titlewise?
TitleWise®
TitleWise takes the guesswork out of collection
development. It is the quickest, easiest, and most
comprehensive online collection analysis tool available!
This service is available at no charge to all Follett Library
Resources customers. Within minutes of sending us your
data, you’ll receive reports detailing the make-up of your
collection (paying special attention to those age-sensitive
Dewey ranges), comparing your collection to other grade-
appropriate recommended school library collections, and
detailing incomplete records.
• TITLEWAVE, TitleWise, TitleCheck & QuizCheck
Paper Sculptures
February 20, 2012 Needs Assessment

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Using the Titlewise tool
Collection Mapping
. . . select your automation system under “Circulation System
Export Instructions.” You are instructed to pull up all your
holdings (or the section you want analyzed), select “all,”
name your file, and save to a disk or even the desktop (which
is probably the easiest way to do it). Once that step is
complete, you export the file you saved.
An eighteen-page analysis is returned in minutes. The cover
sheet declares it to be a Title Wise Collection Analysis with
your school’s name printed on it.
The complete analysis is ideal to share with your
administration along with a suggested plan for how to
bring the collection up to date.
• From School Librarian’s Workshop June 2004.

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Collection-Curriculum Mapping Template
Resource Alignment through
Curriculum-Collection Mapping
Curriculum-Collection_Map_Template.doc
Curriculum Mapping Worksheet.doc
• From SC School Libraries Resources and Links to
Facilitate Creating and Maintaining Quality
School Library Media Programs

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Clients

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Step 2 in collection management


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Alice Yucht on Client Needs
Content:
Is this material appropriate for the age, emotional
development, ability levels, learning styles, and social
development of the students in *this* school, at *this* time?
Keep in mind that we are being paid to provide relevant
resources, not administer an archive. One particular middle
school’s book collection had some glaring gaps as well as aging
artifacts – the building had been a Junior/Senior (gr. 7-12)
high for many years; . . . and nothing had ever been weeded!
Have you carefully checked the age-appropriateness and
relevancy of those URL’s, AND posted a disclaimer on your
website, just in case?
• Collection Development Concerns

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Considering student needs and interests
Makes sense
Including children’s preferences in the building of school
library collections makes sense because children are the
actual consumers of the resources.
An important part of becoming an effective reader is to be
able to select reading materials with relative ease and
facility. Regrettably, what children prefer to read is often
not available in schools.
Thus, every effort should be made to purchase materials
that children will actually read and enjoy.
• Joseph Sanacore, Teacher-librarians, Teachers, and Children as
Cobuilders of School Library Collections. Teacher Librarian
33, 5 (June 2006).

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How do you discover student interests/needs?
Ask them!
Informally:
• Learners . . . benefit from meeting with their teacher or
teacher-librarian to talk about books they are currently
reading or just finished reading. These conferences help
educators gain insights about children’s decoding and
meaning-making strategies through such activities as
conducting running records, encouraging retellings, and
motivating personal responses. These immediate
connections to children’s self-selected materials are
important venues for determining children's reading
interests.
– Joseph Sanacore, Teacher-librarians, Teachers, and Children as
Cobuilders of School Library Collections.

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Asking formally

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Evidence of student interests/needs
Circulation records
Through circulation analysis, I could identify
strengths and weaknesses from patterns of use, with
the goal of making the collection more relevant and
responsive to the needs of its users. I could also
identify little-used items that could be discarded
completely.
•

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Collecting controversial subjects
Example: Homosexuality
. . . according to the 2003 National School Climate
Survey, a biannual study by the Gay, Lesbian and
Straight Education Network (see “Out and
lgnored,” pp. 46-50) . . . nearly 50 percent of the
high school students surveyed say they have no
access to gay-related resources in their media
centers.
•

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Considering teacher needs
Creating a professional collection
The professional collection in a school library should be
carefully selected to meet the demands of the teachers,
administrators, counselors and teacher-librarians who are to
use them. The hallmark of an outstanding professional
collection in library resource centers is heavy usage of the
resources by faculty members (Wilson, 2000).
In order to have an outstanding professional collection, the
teacher-librarian must identify the needs of the instructional
curriculum and identify the teachers’ characteristics,
preferred teaching methods, instructional needs and
information needs (Van Orden, 1995).
• Jordan, J. The Professional Collection: The Teachers’ Professional
Collection Materials: Stimulating Use. Teacher Librarian [serial online].
December 2001;29(2):18.

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The Community

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But what is the (a) community?
community
Main Entry: com·mu·ni·ty
Pronunciation: kə-ˈ myü-nə-tē
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural com·mu·ni·ties
1 : a unified body of individuals: as a : state,
commonwealth b : the people with common
interests living in a particular area; broadly : the
area itself <the problems of a large community> c :
an interacting population of various kinds of
individuals (as species) in a common location

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Community includes parents
Parents can also be clients


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Considering community values
Reflecting community values or diversity?
The librarian’s value judgments must be kept secondary to
what the community of patrons wants and demands. It is the
community’s values which are primary.
• Apponequet Regional High School Library.
Collection Development and Mission Statements.
If education is to be founded on the principle
of exposure to diverse ideas, then it is almost
mandatory that exposure to controversial
material is possible. However, if schools should be
a place for transmitting community values, then
censorship becomes almost compulsory.
Many parents choose schools precisely for the
latter purpose. Amanda Credaro©2001.
Double Jeopardy: Censorship in School Libraries

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A Community Service


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Collection Development Humor
From Warrior Librarian
Original Library Humour:
In Dewey (Shelf) Order
025.2 Collection Development
• Fictional Titles: Books Not Yet Written
New Book Titles (Covers)
Math For the Masses:
Fiction and Non-fiction
More New Books for Realistic Libraries
Serials with Popular Appeal
Thin Books for Busy Librarians

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A Vital Latin Phrase for collection development
In response to patron evaluation of a book:
“This book sucks”
Your response: “Nullus est liber tam malus ut non
aliqua parte prosit.”
• Translation: “There is no book so bad that it is
not profitable in part.” (Pliny the Younger).
– Biblia’s Warrior Librarian, “Vital Latin Phrases for
Librarians.”