Today, I am kicking off a new series called Thinking Like a Librarian at Home. This series will focus on applying ideas from librarianship to your home collection. Each post in the series will focus on a core principle in Collection Development & Management adapted for a household.

Is your “to be read” list out of control? Are you in charge of finding educational and entertainment materials for your family members? Are you on a budget and wanting to add materials to your library that will have lasting meaning? Do you want to browse the library with purpose (sometimes at least!)? If you’re nodding along, then this series is for you.

The series will be organized by core principles, with activities to help you understand each principle and put it into practice. In upcoming post(s), I am going to focus on the first, and perhaps most important, core principle: You must know your readers* to successfully develop and maintain your collection.

What the heck is Collection Development and Management?

Collection Development & Management is a set of skills and practices that answer the following questions:

• What materials will you be bringing into your house to be part of your home library? What materials won’t be in your home library?
• Why are those materials right (or not) for your home library?
• What limits your ability to add materials to your library?
• When will you remove materials from your home library? Why will you remove materials from your home library?
• What are your overall goals for your home library?
• Who has a say in what gets added to your home library and how do they get to make their voices heard?

To put it another way, Collection Development and Management is a purpose-driven set of practices that tells a librarian which materials belong in their collection, which materials do not belong in their collection, what their overall goals are for the collection, and which processes they will use to achieve those goals.

As mentioned above, next up we will explore a very important principle of Collection Development & Management: Know the readers* in your household.

_{*Throughout this series I will use the term “readers” because I prefer it over “users” (which I find to be a bit clinical!). However, this series will apply to people who are collecting materials other than print books and to people who cannot or do not read print books. I welcome feedback on a potential terms that are more inclusive than “reader,” less clinical than “user,” and applicable in a household.}