However, the downside to this model is that you loose the expertise of a person working inside of a branch who works with the collection on a daily basis. That person knows what is checking out and what is no longer popular. That person knows what they need new copies of and what is still in good circulating condition. One of the main challenges of centralized collection is how the centralized selector can tap into that local expertise while having one person order.
What Youth Services did, and it is something that I think we did (and still currently do) very well was to set up a way to maintain and tap into that knowledge. It wasn’t complicated and it was a system that even the most lo-tech among us felt comfortable with. We created a spreadsheet where librarians at branches could write replacement and new titles that they would like ordered for their locations. In teen and children’s collections having new copies of classics is a big part of collection development and this really helped me know exactly what needed to be ordered. I would go further and just check the catalog for other branches at the same time so that I could double check whether or not other branches needed copies as well and then do one order. (which is really one of the benefits of having a centralized collector).
Additionally, we designated a person to relocate books that for whatever reason were not checking out at one location. These books had to be in pristine “like new” condition. We would withdraw them from one branch, send them to the re-locator, who would then see if another branch needed that title. This helped our budget tremendously. Books were sent to other locations where they got a new chance of readership, collections were kept fresh with different titles arriving, and titles that were lost and stolen had a chance to be replaced without costing the collection budget anything at all. We used this to fill out series, to disperse duplicates, etc.
The other big part of collection development is keeping up with the hot new titles. Reading professional review journals is one aspect of this. The online conversation, which will be delved into in further posts, is the other.
