Lying eyes: The (misleading) perception of collections

Abstract

“Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them.” Obi-wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) tells this to Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) in one of my favorite films, Star Wars: A New Hope. The interesting observation about that line is most of the time you can trust what you see with your own eyes. However, there are those select occasions where things may be hidden or not quite as they seem.

As a collection development librarian, I help oversee and monitor our library’s print and electronic collections. One of the problems that I see (and sometimes hear about) through feedback is the physical appearance of our print collection. Row after row of books collected from decades ago containing shelf after shelf of faded spine labels. Honestly, this dilemma is not new. How do we strike a balance of changing formats while battling a visible perception of outdated materials and their impact on the perception of the library? Sure, weeding helps with some of this. However, without options to effectively rejuvenate the collection, all weeding would be doing is subtracting rather than supporting. Plus, some libraries including my own do not necessarily have easy remote storage options. There are also many other factors involved, including user preferences, allocation methods, usage data, collaborative collecting, and more.