Library Liaison's Training Guide to Collection Management

Library liaisons often have primary jobs that do not involve collection development, but their familiarity with collection practices makes all the difference in faculty relations. And time pressures mean that on-boarding needs to be as streamlined as possible. This concise, field-tested training manual will put your liaison on solid footing. Plus, end of the chapter prompts make it easy to tailor your approach to local practices. With the help of this resource, your new liaison will get up to speed on such topics as

• tracking budget balances in assigned departments;
• differentiating between the needs of an individual faculty member and their department;
• how to say no to monograph requests;
• benchmarking titles with peer institutions or coordinating within a consortium;
• 17 questions to ask when evaluating a database;
• considerations when making weeding decisions;
• four key conversations to have annually between liaisons and collection development librarians; and
• gathering data for program accreditation reports.

Alison M. Armstrong has been the collection management librarian at Radford University in Virginia since 2011. She has a BA in literature from the University of North Carolina at Asheville and an MLIS from the University of North Texas. She is an instructor of the “Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management” and the “Fundamentals of Collection Assessment” web courses. Armstrong serves on the Collection Committee of the Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) and was co-chair of VIVA’s Monographic Collection Analysis Task Force. She served on the Montgomery-Floyd Regional Library System’s Board of Trustees from 2012 to 2020. She has also served on multiple ALCTS committees.

Lisa Dinkle is an instruction librarian at Radford University. She was the collection assistant there from 2014 to 2016. She has degrees in history and library information science. Her dual role as a library liaison and instruction librarian gives her more opportunities to connect with her departments. These opportunities have allowed her to collaborate with faculty and students to showcase library resources and services. She is the founding member of an instruction librarians’ book club, which invites librarians to build their instructional skills through reading, discussion, and praxis, with occasional conversational detours into collection development and library liaison practices at other institutions.