A collection management training guide for library liaisons

CHICAGO — Library liaisons often have primary jobs that do not involve collection development, but their familiarity with collection practices makes all the difference in faculty relations. And time pressures mean that on-boarding needs to be as streamlined as possible. “The Library Liaison's Training Guide to Collection Management,” published by ALA Editions, is a concise, field-tested training manual that includes end of the chapter prompts, making it easy to tailor your approach to local practices. With the help of this resource, your new liaison will get up to speed on such topics as:

• tracking budget balances in assigned departments;
• differentiating between the needs of an individual faculty member and their department;
• how to say no to monograph requests;
• benchmarking titles with peer institutions or coordinating within a consortium;
• 17 questions to ask when evaluating a database;
• considerations when making weeding decisions;
• four key conversations to have annually between liaisons and collection development librarians; and
• gathering data for program accreditation reports.

Armstrong has been the collection management librarian at Radford University in Virginia since 2011. An instructor of “Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management” and “Fundamentals of Collection Assessment” web courses, she also serves on the Collection Committee of the Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) and was co-chair of VIVA’s Monographic Collection Analysis Task Force. She served on the Montgomery-Floyd Regional Library System’s Board of Trustees from 2012 to 2020 and has also served on multiple ALCTS committees. Dinkle is an instruction librarian at Radford University. She is the founding member of an instruction librarians’ book club, which invites librarians to build their instructional skills through reading, discussion, and praxis, with occasional conversational detours into collection development and library liaison practices at other institutions.

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Related Links

"The Library Liaison's Training Guide to Collection Management"

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