THE “CORE COLLECTION”


To embark on launching or relaunching an academic library demands that the librarian responsible develop some scheme for guiding his or her choice of monographs and serials and, in the last decade, electronic resources too.  A debate went on for most of the 20th century over the idea of the “core collection” for the undergraduate element of the academic library.  The idea is to determine what are the important books for a broad undergraduate education. This “core collection,” which amounts to a very long bibliography had been intended to guide purchasing in academic libraries.  This route would see all academic libraries possess exactly the same undergraduate collection.

On the other hand is the belief that the undergraduate collection ought to be a response to the curriculum itself, which is a reflection of faculty teaching interests. Rather than focusing on some ideal of undergraduate needs, this school of thought is more interested in acquiring books and serials to support the real curriculum.

Hardesty and Mak write in support of the core collection. “While research collections should have considerable diversity and depth reflecting the research interests of local scholars, undergraduate libraries should have a higher degree of similarity built around a core collection that serves the more limited needs of undergraduates [Hardesty and Mak].  They note the historical attempts to come up with a core collection from which existing libraries may develop an acquisitions policy. New libraries are supposed to use these lists to establish their opening day collection (ODC): Shaw’s List from the 1930s, and more recently the Choice publications’ Opening Day Collection [Opening Day] and the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Books for College Libraries: A Core Collection of 40,000 Titles [Association of College].

Defenders of these lists stand against the library choosing books that complement the varied undergraduate courses. The result, they see, is an incoherent collection based on faculty who believe “students should master whatever it is the faculty finds interesting enough to study” [Barnett].  But faculty with their specific research interests come and go, and older professors shift their research interests, which leaves large collections of books “orphaned,” never to be used again [Barnett].

In a response to Lynn Cheney’s book supporting a core curriculum (and by extension a core collection) for all undergraduates in the United States, James W. Reed writes “Dr. Cheney seems to undervalue contemporary research and to underestimate the potential harm to the vitality of our teaching that might come from forcing scholars away from their strongest interests in order to staff a core curriculum” [Reed].

Still, when a library is launched or relaunched and a large number of titles (including electronic titles) are needed in a short period of time, the librarian must make many decisions himself or herself regarding acquisitions. Faculty invited to provide input into essential texts and other resources are not uniform in their desire to help out.  And faculty members, consumed as they are, frequently, with their own high level research, are not familiar with all the works appropriate for undergraduates.


 

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