Collections Stewardship Projects

Faculty at Davidson College have a vested interest in the development and stewardship of the library's collections. As part of the process of evaluating library collections, the library provides measures for faculty to weigh in on retention or deselection decisions.

The library extracts relevant data pertaining to collections using decision support tools such as GreenGlass. That data will be distributed using spreadsheets sorted by the following criteria:

• Call Number (top line): Filtering items by call number will provide subject or discipline-specific lists of resources that can be reviewed by librarians and/or faculty with relevant expertise.

• Bibliographic information: Criteria such as author, title, imprint, date of publication, and imprint will establish disambiguation of resources.

• Library Holdings: Information on the availability of titles by other holding libraries (North Carolina, U.S., global, partners/consortia, retention partnerships) provide information on rarity/uniqueness as well as a measure of certainty that titles will be accessible elsewhere if deselected.

The spreadsheet(s) will be distributed internally to library teams to make initial recommendations:

• Collections Strategies: will provide broad recommendations based on duplication, condition, completeness, and usage. In some cases, there may be subject-specific expertise that is leveraged in making recommendations.

• Archives, Special Collections, and Community: will provide recommendations based on the uniqueness of the content and subject matter.

• Research, Learning, and Outreach: will provide recommendations based on currency, accuracy, and relevance of the resource to current teaching and learning needs as evidenced by utilization in library instruction and research support.

Faculty: will utilize subject matter expertise to make recommendations for retention or deselection of materials. At this point, the faculty will have contextual information provided by the library based on duplication, condition, completeness, and usage to guide their recommendations.