History of the Department
History
The Book Selection Department, as the Collection Development Department was called until 1991, was established late in 1965. The year 1966/7 was largely a period of organization, during which existing staff took on new responsibilities, new staff were recruited, and approval plans (known at the University of Toronto as Dealer Selection Orders or DSOs) were established. The number of active DSOs rose from one in July 1966 to 34 in June 1967. Since then, their number has grown as the Department expanded systematic acquisition policies to more challenging areas outside Europe and North America. By 2005 there were 55 DSOs.
The establishment of the Department was the Library's response to an unprecedented expansion during the 1960s of graduate programmes at the University of Toronto, many of them in non-traditional fields. It was clear that the old Acquisitions Department – which was geared mainly to processing individual faculty requests on a first-come, first-served basis for as long as the year's book budget lasted – could not meet the more complex collection needs of an expanded University, and was wasteful and inefficient. It was felt that the University's new and expanded needs would best be met by specialised selectors who would be responsible for collection development in their designated areas. The business aspect of acquisitions – ordering, receiving, paying invoices and book-keeping – was assigned to a newly-established Order Department.
The main activity of the Collection Development Department is selection of library materials both within and outside the framework of the DSO system. In recent years this has included the entirely new activity of evaluating and selecting electronic resources, both standalone and networked online, in addition to the traditional print and microform. Less obviously, the Department deals with all questions and problems concerned with acquisitions which are not simply matters of book-keeping or record-keeping.Selectors also make decisions on the acceptance of gifts and gift collections, and are responsible for retrospective collection development. Knowledge of the antiquarian book trade and ingenuity in maintaining and spending funds is an essential part of this work, while the Library has benefited from the selectors' skill in obtaining donations-in-kind and grants in support of specialized collections. This subject expertise also allows the selectors to organize or contribute to exhibitions in Robarts Library and in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library; these exhibitions and their catalogues are an important source of publicity for the Library and the University.
The continuing assessment of the Library's collections is another necessary part of the work of the Department. Each year a number of the University's graduate programmes come under review, and the appropriate selectors must present a statement of the Library's ability to support them, and meet with the assessors to answer their library-related queries. The selectors also assemble bibliographic and bibliometric information for shelf-list counts and collection inventory programmes which allow comparisons among institutions.
All of the Collection Development Department's staff deal regularly with a varied clientele of Library colleagues, faculty, potential faculty candidates, students, members of the public, donors potential and actual, booksellers, publishers' representatives, visiting scholars, and librarians from all over the world. They give visitors tours of the Library, explain acquisitions practices, policies and procedures to users, and provide specialized reference service to other Library departments and to the departmental libraries. The combined experience of its selectors and assistants allows the Collection Development Department to make an essential contribution to the excellence of the Library's service.
Recent developments in the Collection Development Department have required some modification of the original scheme of the Department, and have undeniably presented real challenges. Funding has occasionally been insufficient to maintain selection at the optimum level toward the end of the fiscal year, and some gaps were created. On two occasions, cancellation of less important periodical titles had to be undertaken, with the help of the teaching staff, and cancellation of paper copies of titles available online is now normal. Staff reductions have required combining subject responsibilities, and most Department staff now perform duties in other Library departments such as Reference, Cataloguing, and Rare Books. Another new duty will be the ongoing selection of material to be sent to UTL at Downsview, the Library's new offsite high-density storage facility.
Technology has brought new possibilities but has also led to the disappearance of clerical help. Although the University's policy has consistently maintained the Library's purchasing power for monographs over the years, funding for periodicals and electronic resources must be rigorously controlled, and co-operative acquisition and appeals for gifts and grants have become increasingly important. Still, the staffing of the Department has proved to be remarkably stable over the past forty years. The reasons for this stability are many and individual, but one common thread must surely be a high level of job satisfaction. No two staff members would give the same reasons for this, but most would mention the freedom to use their judgement in a constantly changing, unpredictable publishing and bookselling environment, and to see the results of that judgement take substance in the collections of the finest library in Canada.
The Dealer Selection Order System
For the past forty years, the Library's main source of currently published works has been its various DSOs, the purpose of which is to ensure as comprehensive a coverage of the world's important new publications as possible while at the same time reducing ordering and book-keeping procedures to a minimum. The 55 DSOs mostly cover individual countries or groups of countries; in addition there are some special orders for music scores, atlases, and certain publishers. In some cases the Library participates in co-operative programs operated by the US Library of Congress, but most DSOs are with commercial agents who have a proven record of good service. In one case the Library's relations with the dealer (Brockhaus/German Books and its predecessors) go back more than a hundred years.
Dealers are authorized to select and send important new publications first produced in their respective countries which, in their treatment and subject interest, are felt to be of university research quality. They are provided with lists of the subjects which comprise our interests and are instructed not to exceed the sums which we allocate to each order without our written authorization. The Library reserves the right to return any book which it deems to fall outside the provisions of its order.
Most of the countries covered by our DSOs produce weekly or monthly national or trade bibliographies which dealers are asked to use as their basic guides for selection. They mark the selections which they are making and send the bibliographies to the Collection Development Department. These bibliographies are then examined by selectors (and eventually by the Head of the Department), who not only make additional selections but also are able to measure a dealer's performance against the total or nearly total output of the country covered, and can thus both refine our subject profiles and educate the dealer. Some dealers are able to supply title slips (in paper or, increasingly, in electronic format) to supplement or substitute for bibliographies, and selectors of course have also many other sources of information, including requests from Library users.
Additional selections are always necessary, either for technical reasons or because they are borderline cases which dealers prefer to leave to our judgement. Most importantly, our additional selections enable us to counterbalance an individual dealer's deficiencies and ensure an overall consistency. Some dealers are generally cautious in all fields. Others are cautious in some fields but not in others. The wide variation is shown by the fact that our additional selections amount to as much as 60% in some cases, and to as little as 10% in others. The average is about 40%. For some areas (Africa and Latin America, for example) no suitable bibliographies exist. In these cases, we necessarily place more reliance on our dealer's judgement.
Basic principles underlying acquisition of current books by the DSO system
- That it is feasible to collect comprehensively in any field only when books are first published, since only then is the full range of what is published readily available.
- That this form of acquisition lends itself to procedural simplifications which result in very significant savings in time and money.
- That this form of acquisition is best able to react immediately and flexibly to changes in publication patterns.
Main Exclusions
- Categories of material
General expositions and popularizations of topics presumably well covered in more academic works.
Textbooks, either all textbooks or those below specified levels. Our instructions vary slightly from subject to subject and from country to country.
Most children's books.
Most translations into languages other than English.
In the Humanities and Social Sciences, new editions which have not been substantially revised and/or do not contain significant additions to the original work. This exclusion does not apply to the Physical and Life Sciences, where all new editions irrespective of the degree of revision are to be supplied.
- Subjects
Works in the field of education below university level which are not also of obvious importance to other disciplines. The OISE/UT Library does its own selection in this field.
Works on the science and practice of law which are not also of obvious importance to other disciplines. The Law Library does its own selection in this field.
Works dealing with agriculture and veterinary medicine which are not also of obvious importance to other disciplines.
Statistics
Close to 1,000,000 titles are published throughout the world every year. Over the last six years the DSO system has provided us with an average of 99,609.
Effectiveness of the DSO system
Before the DSO system was established, the Library received an estimated 120,000 purchase requests from teaching departments every year, a workload which an acquisitions department larger than the present Collection Development Department was quite unable to handle. We now receive a few hundred such requests, most of them for titles which are already here or expected. Our Order Department currently has no processing backlog, and a reputation for prompt payment.Whenever the effectiveness of the DSO system as a means of acquiring new books has been tested, the results have been quite striking. Bibliographical checks in a number of subject fields have shown that, since 1966, the Library has tended to acquire between 75% and 95% of desirable currently published titles, as opposed to between 35% and 60% before 1966.
