Confessions of a Rogue Library Book Buyer is an article by a former university administrator. What he did, with the aid of a complicit librarian, would make an interesting exercise for an Ethics class.
While I don’t feel that they approached the situation in the correct manner, I can certainly understand their motives (and appreciate that they focused on improving the collection). It is amazing how often faculty and departments don’t realize just what they could do for their library, majors and institutions by paying closer attention to their library allocations.
I suspect that most universities & colleges have procedures in place to deal with unused allocations, rather than letting them build up. Thought experiment : what areas of your library’s collection would most benefit from a burst of extra purchasing?
found via LISNews
