As a public high school librarian with a small budget, Jain Orr was determined to spend her limited funds on books that actually piqued the interest of her diverse teen population. How do you buy books that actually get checked out? What books spark joy? Jain developed a toolbox of "community-led collection development" strategies to ensure that her library holdings reflected the material that her population wanted. This session will describe practices that can be implemented immediately to make "community-led" your primary form of library acquisition, no matter what kind of library you work in. With time and fidelity, these strategies develop a culture of community library input where the service population guides collection development and library staff act as facilitators (not experts).
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this class, students will be able to:
- describe the benefits of community-led collection development.
- list and employ indirect data collection strategies.
- articulate the material (or infrastructural) conditions where community-led collection development can begin immediately and grow into a taken-for-granted mode of library practice.
Instructor
Jain Orr spent 5 years as a high school librarian in Austin ISD and has a background in grassroots activism, community development and ethnographic research. Currently, she is a first-year doctoral student at the University of Texas interested in the impact of school librarianship, particularly at the secondary level.