Approved 2008

The Director will use a variety of tools to aid in awareness and selection of materials, including such sources as professional review journals, popular print and broadcast media, bookstores, electronic interest groups, publishers’ catalogs, purchase alerts, and patron and staff recommendations.

The Director will exercise judgment, experience, and expertise in selecting materials, making acquisition decisions as objectively as possible. Evaluation of a work includes the entire work, not just individual parts of the work. A work’s overall contribution to the collection is a critical determinant for acceptance or rejection. No single criterion can be applied to all materials, and various criteria carry different weights in different circumstances. Contextual considerations – budget and space availability, interlibrary loan availability – also shape the selection process. The library considers all acquisitions, whether purchased or donated, in terms of one or more of the following:

• Level of funding for materials
• Relevance to Library’s mission and service roles
• Informational and recreational needs of users
• Local demand
• Current usefulness or interest
• Community needs surveys and assessments
• Authority and accuracy
• Importance as a record of the times
• Relevance to the existing collection’s strengths and weaknesses
• High standards of quality in content and format
• Price and availability
• Format, durability, and ease of use
• Suitability of format for subject and user’s needs
• Relevance to the history of Buckland

COLLECTION MAINTENANCE & WEEDING
Collection maintenance optimizes the Library’s usefulness by ensuring that materials are appropriate to the library’s objectives, easy to locate, and attractive to users. The Library’s credibility is enhanced when the books and other materials are found by patrons to be up to date and relevant, and when the library’s bibliographic records, such as the online catalog, accurately reflect the library’s holdings. The ongoing process of collection maintenance will include inventory control, analysis and deselection

Materials that no longer meet the stated objectives of the library are identified, withdrawn, and discarded according to accepted professional practices. The library director conduct deselection, also known as weeding, under the general guidance of the Western Massachusetts Regional Library System and the Board of Trustees.  Deselection is often appropriate for materials that are damaged, worn, superseded, replaced, outdated, duplicated, no longer useful, no longer in demand, or trivial.

GIFTS AND DONATIONS
Gifts and donations of materials accepted by the Buckland Public Library are subject to the same process as purchased materials. They are considered with the explicit understanding that such factors as duplication, merit, lack of community interest, processing costs, physical condition of the materials, or inadequate shelf space may prevent their addition to the collection or permanent retention on the shelves. Gifts and donations are accepted with the understanding that the Library may, at any time, discard them or offer them for sale through the Library Book Sale program.