I talked about "serve the community" in the last post, and there is another issue regarding it as a core value: collection development.
I see myself has a good taste in Chinese books and will feel sad when seeing the books in a bookstore or library are books which don't deserve to be read. As I can imagine, the selection of library resources is a hard phase, who should decide which books to buy? In such economic downturn, shall the library place more strict regulation ensuring only books with certain quality will be purchased?
The answer is no. The idea behind the word "quality" is biased. Quality of the books is not the criteria in building library collection, instead, the need of the community. The book with high quality or great significance, but no reader in the community makes no sense. "Books are for use." is the very first law of Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science. The library collection must meet the requirement of local community. If the community has interest in reading a book, then the library probably should add the book into its collection.
The people who can influence the policy of the library are board trustees. I asked Nicole who can be on the "board of trustees", she said for public library, maybe everyone in the community can volunteer to be a member of the board trustees.
Will do some research on following issues:
1. The constitution of board trustees.
2. Library assessment, how to decide the effectiveness of library service and the satisfaction of the patrons.
3. The regular procedure of library's collection development. How to know if the local patrons will be interested in the book?
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