SJCPL Collection Development

Print Materials

Principles

Our goal is to have the books and other print materials our public wants, when they want them. To accomplish this, we purchase multiple copies of books from high demand authors and on high demand topics. We establish title limits to ensure that we have resources to buy sufficient numbers of copies of the most popular books.  We order these books before their publication dates to ensure they are available when people want them.  We also purchase single copies of titles that we expect to circulate well.

We utilize patron requests and holds to anticipate demand for new titles and to identify after publication date any titles we miss.  We purchase most patron requests but may reject suggestions for titles that are too specialized for our collections.  Examples of titles we don’t generally purchase include graduate level research materials, textbooks, and most monographs of primary sources.  We may decline requests for expensive titles if the selector does not believe the title will be in demand.  We utilize Interlibrary Loan to fill any requests beyond our scope.