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Book Reviews

Vicki Gregory. Collection Development and 
Management for 21st Century Library 
Collections: An Introduction. New York: 
Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2011. 260p. 
alk. paper, $75 (ISBN 9781555706517). 
LC2011-009274.

Vicki Gregory enters a textbook market 
dominated by Edward Evans’ many edi-
tions of Developing Library and Information 
Center Collections and, more recently, by 
Peggy Johnson’s Fundamentals of Collection 
Development and Management. Other intro-
ductory texts exist, as do many narrower 
collection management (CM) works 
focused by type of library, by material 
format, or by specific subtopics (such as 
collection policies or evaluation).

Evans’ most recent edition reaches over 
six hundred pages; and Johnson’s second 
edition, four hundred pages. Both are 
thorough treatments. Both, like the work 
at hand, attempt to include all types of li-
braries, yet favor academic libraries where 
all authors have their greatest grounding. 
Johnson’s titling of her sweeping work 
“Fundamentals” is an acknowledgement 
that the span of collection management 
stretches easily beyond any single work. 
Where does collection management end 
and acquisitions, e-resources manage-
ment, cataloging, or even government 
documents begin? Collection manage-
ment, as all full-time practitioners know 
well, is an area with no clear boundaries, 
diffusing into all areas of librarianship. 
This creates a challenging task for the all-
in-one CM textbook author.

Gregory, who is on the faculty of the 
University of South Florida School of 
Library and Information Science, brings 
thirty-five years of experience to this 
work, with the most recent twenty-five 
as a faculty member. She is the author 
of three other library science texts and 
teaches collection development. 

She considers her primary audience 
here to be graduate students and retool-

ing librarians, and she cor-
rectly determines that there 
is room in the marketplace 
for a collection management 
text that is truly introduc-
tory, as her subtitle indicates. 
This work does not directly 
compete with Evans or Johnson in scope, 
authoritative tone, or depth. It is a suffi-
cient overview of the field, written in an 
easily read conversational style with the 
information presented concisely; there 
is hardly a page lacking a bulleted list 
of summary points regarding attributes, 
aspects, or criteria pertinent to the topic 
at hand. 

In a demanding, fast-paced collection 
management graduate class, this text’s 
twelve chapters, occupying approximate-
ly 175 text pages (excluding end-of-chap-
ter material, references, and suggested 
readings), might properly occupy the 
first two weeks of a three–semester-hour 
CM class, grounding the class in concepts 
and terminology. From there, an instruc-
tor would use other readings to draw in 
more detail licensing, collection policies, 
budgets, individual and peculiar format 
concerns, and other key CM elements.

Particular strengths here are the topic 
overviews on weeding; license negotia-
tion; and gifts and donations. The pre-
sentation is organized around processes 
(selection, budgeting, cooperation, and 
so on) rather than format. Each chapter 
includes suggested classroom activities, 
discussion questions, and key vocabulary. 
The chapter on selection processes offers 
well-established and familiar general 
and specific criteria, with an overview 
of electronic resource selection consid-
erations. Gregory’s conversational style 
allows insightful asides where actual CM 
practice may often fall outside policy. A 
CM librarian’s day is greatly assisted by 
having coherent policy and institutional 
memory, but the daily work is often fixing 



600 College & Research Libraries November 2011

myriad exceptions to policy. An accom-
panying CD-ROM contains real-world 
collection development policies from 
various-sized academic, public, school, 
and special libraries, as well as a useful 
classified list of vendors.

Care is taken in noting shortcomings in 
any brief treatment, but these few aspects 
merit notice. Electronic resources are at 
times treated as new, different, intrusive, 
rather than the now dominant format in 
most CM work. There is no mention in 
the collection evaluation discussion of 
the brief tests methodologies or Howard 
White’s work. Distance learning, now 
comprising half of the graduate popula-
tion in some universities, is given one 
paragraph. Approval plans and the “big 
deal” are only briefly discussed. The 
price, at $75, is high for a paperback text 
marketed to poor graduate students. 
Where Evans and Johnson offer many 
pro/con positions on some topics, this 
work is understandably less developed 
beyond a presentation of core collection 
development issues. 

This and most CM texts are more 
monograph-centric than libraries will 
ever be again. Books and their trade were 
once central to CM work, but no more. 
The CM terrain is changing quickly, and 
it is difficult to treat this morphing in 
an all-in-one CM text. Dramatic journal 
marketing changes; the end of the paper 
journal; and the rise of the big deal (a term 
Gregory misapplies to aggregator packag-
es) have redistributed the monograph/se-
rials budget ratio in the direction of 30/70 
or beyond. With the seismic movement of 
academic CM expenditures toward elec-
tronic resources, the CM librarian’s work 
is only occasionally concerned with the 
details of paper materials. Departmental 
book fund allocation lines have become 
about the table scraps left after e-serials 
feast on the budget with their 1000+ title, 
often-undifferentiated, single-invoice 
journal packages.

Are the many paragraphs here and 
elsewhere devoted to past CM and ac-
quisitions processes needed to educate 

contemporary CM students and incom-
ing practioners? For decades, selection 
processes changed slowly, and a review 
of evolutionary process and practice 
history may have been informative. 
With the disruptive and revolutionary 
changes brought by the overwhelming 
shift to a digital CM environment, why 
revisit and explain how libraries once 
did things if there is not a clear lineage 
to the present practice and methods? To 
let one example suffice: is any discussion 
of the Farmington Plan needed? It is not 
that this is not important, but there is so 
much to current collection management 
and such topics may best be left to courses 
in library history with its recountings of 
mediated Dialog searching and illustra-
tions of Kardex check-in files. 

Gregory’s text completes what may 
be the end-of-days for the all-in-one col-
lection development and management 
textbook. It is a good, easily read, intro-
ductory overview of the major issues and 
topic areas in the discipline. Future CM 
texts would benefit from a single type of 
library focus with exploration of the is-
sues of concern to those libraries.—John P. 
Abbott, Appalachian State University.

R. David Lankes. The Atlas of New Librari-
anship. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT 
Press; Chicago: Association of Col-
lege & Research Libraries, 2011. 408p. 
alk. paper. $55 (ISBN 9780262015097). 
LCCN: 2010-022788.

Over the last two decades, the profes-
sion of librarianship has found itself 
confronted by a rapidly changing infor-
mational environment that many in the 
field perceive as holding both promise 
and peril. On one hand, the emergence 
of new digital technologies has greatly 
increased the number of tools that can 
be harnessed to enhance library service. 
On the other, as venues for information 
seeking beyond the library continue to 
proliferate on the World Wide Web, there 
is considerable unease about the position 
of libraries in an increasingly crowded 
and chaotic informational landscape. In