An alternative vision of librarianship: James Danky and the sociocultural politics of collection development

Library Trends, Wntr, 2008 by Juris Dilevko

As Charles Willett (1998) bluntly noted, academic libraries that put their faith in approval plans often failed to provide adequate coverage of alternative materials that challenged "conservative" and "authoritarian" policies, which in turn reinforced "a biased set of ideas in support of elite beliefs and goals" (p.

93). Instead, they invariably bought "the same general core collection" of books from vendors who dealt with "well-known" publishers (p. 93). If libraries wanted to ensure that their collections contained a substantial number of alternative materials, they had to bypass "mainstream distribution channels" and take time-consuming (and expensive) steps to systematically identify and order alternative publications (e.g., Minneapolis Community & Technical College, n.d.). As acquisitions budgets became tighter in the last decades of the twentieth century, only the most persistent libraries systematically collected monographs published by alternative presses (Lee, 2002), choosing instead to spend their budgets on what they perceived to be more reputable core items from mainstream presses. Even a strong supporter of approval plans such as Robert F. Nardini (2003) commented that one of the unresolved "objections" to them was that "vendor concentration on mainstream, profitable books would produce library collections that were too much alike, without the collective richness resulting from local selection in support of local needs" (p. 133). Summarizing her previous research, Anna H. Perrault (1999) observed that "there was an increase in homogeneity in the acquisitions of the group of member libraries of the ARL [Association of Research Libraries] in 1989 from that of 1985" insofar as "there was a decrease in foreign language acquisitions, a decrease in the percentage of unique titles to the total in many subject areas, and an increased concentration on core materials, indicating less diversity and more homogeneity in academic library collections in the future" (p. 51). Although a cause-and-effect relationship cannot be demonstrated between the growth of approval plans and the homogenization of collections, the economic realities faced by vendors often worked against the sustained inclusion in approval plans of monographs published by alternative presses.