The Library Science collection

A bit off topic for this week I guess (seeing as it's not to do with my website project) but I am currently weeding our library-science collection and, well, I am starting to wonder what other libraries have in their collections.

A list of some of the less relevant things I have:

• Library Service in Victoria produced by the Library Council of Victoria in April 1970 (and purchased later that year). Rivetting stuff. Highly relevant to a library in 2008.

• Stress Control by Steve Bell. We actually have a large number of books on controlling stress, it doesn't really invite confidence in me having a good working environ here does it?

• The Publishing and Review of Reference Sources which was published in 1987. Again, highly relevant, especially with the chapter on modern publishing methods such as the optical disk and those expensive online databases such as DIALOG.

In all honesty, the vast bulk of the collection has not been touched since the books were intially purchased. All of our library science periodicals are accessible online through our virtual resources. Currently these periodicals sit here and our staff can reserve them to read. Noone does. Instead we are going to make a push for staff to be notified by our databases when new issues of each LS periodical comes out and they can read them online (Dear Bob, The latest copy of inCite is available to read, isn't that fun? Lots of love, EBSCO).

I'd love to know what other libraries have in their collection though. So far I have kept a single book on building a library (it goes through how much space you should assign for each collection and I really haven't seen much else on the topic before) and reports that staff refer to frequently such as our annual report and a couple of years' worth of the survey of Victorian public libraries. Most everything else is available online, it's not like we need much of the book trends stuff in hardcopy anymore.