read-and-recycle – Informative Flights – Musings of a Teacher Librarian

Each library we visited went about creating, updating and weeding their collection in different ways. On the one hand we had UWCSEA-East, where the librarian could build up a collection of 30,000 items from scratch, and had the luxury of being able to carefully consider the philosophy behind the collection. On the other, we had the Institute of South East Asian Studies, with a 45 year history of receiving donations and making acquisitions and doing a stocktake and serious consideration of its collection for the first time this year.

Common themes were the shift from print to digital. Each library had found their own balance between providing patrons with books and journals and enabling access to digital information. Along with the shift to digital media came the responsibility of teaching information literacy (IL). We were exposed to some innovative and very fun ways of teaching IL across the board where the emphasis was on making students comfortable with interacting with the librarians in the library setting, as well as being able to help themselves on line and in the book stacks.

Preservation of collection was an important issue given the hot and humid climate of Singapore and the expense of air conditioning. Books got infected by mold, mold is both contagious to other books, and a health and safety issue for employees and users. It’s very expensive to treat. Microfilm deteriorated, particularly the technologies prior to 1980. Damp affect photos and films. Digitization was expensive and time consuming and could result in the library running foul of copyright laws. All this indicated that libraries needed to be extremely disciplined in their acquisition and weeding with some good co-ordination and networking to ensure that sufficient copies of valuable materials were available and preserved but without unnecessary duplication.

It was interesting to see how the different libraries managed their life style collection. For some, like Ngee Ann Polytechnic, it was a drawcard for their students, located on the first floor with a very welcoming interactive bookstore / cafe type concept. For Temasek, it was on a higher level, and less well patronized – in fact the librarian mentioned that sometimes students came there as it was quieter than the quiet / academic parts of the library.

Weeding policies differed by institution from a strict “anything older than 12 years gets thrown” to “we’ve never weeded”. SMU had a sophisticated set of RUF (relative use factor) statistics which it used for purchasing profiling its collection and weeding.
How does a library deal with it’s unwanted books? UWCSEA-East had created a read-and-recycle program outside the library, where the school community was welcome to take books and pass them on. NLB had a bookcross and book sale scheme to get books out into the Singaporean community.

Most libraries were shifting towards an on-demand as opposed to “just in case” collection development policy. Collections were added to on recommendation from lecturers and students who were also invited to attend book fairs held by trade and public suppliers.

Student designed periodical stand

Lifestyle section organised like a bookstore

The survival of both the physical entity and concept of “the library” depends on it being well utilized. All libraries visited were extremely proactive in their promotion efforts. Most began during the orientation week with activities to get students into the library. These ranged from library orientation programs in the form of games, exhibitions and events. At NTU, each new student gets a letter from his/her “personal librarian” inviting them to tea!

Ngee Ann Polytechnic use their interactive space for presentations and lectures, outside visitors and have created a very inviting “lifestyle” area based on a bookstore / cafe concept. They were the first academic library here with a life-style area and took their ideas from shopping centres and bookstores and cafes and ventured out of the library to see where their students hung out. As a result they created a board game zone which is a popular cafe concept in Singapore. They have an extensive collection of both common and unique board games. Having a Board game rooms was a theme we saw duplicated in nearly every library here.

Ngee Ann – a collection on wealth creation situated next to the Bloomberg monitors and a presentation area where speakers are invited on finance / entrepreneurial / business matters.

Cafe with bar stools and ipads in Lifestyle area

Interactive desk top with games and quizes

Student designed lighting

Singapore Polytechnic differentiates different areas of the library by colors and has invited students and lecturers to play an important role in the design of the library and the library furniture and hardware. This has resulted in students feeling a sense of “ownership” of the space, as well as very aesthetically pleasing areas. Details such as display, lightening, notice boards, magazine cabinets etc, had been designed and created on campus.

Innovative flexible signage

The library was also exploring having makerspaces with 3D printers, lego mindstorms and creative space where students were challenged to create something with materials provided.

interactive booth

Almost all the libraries provided some kind of an e-newsletter or alert service to subscribers. Most had some presence on social media, the most common being Facebook. In some instances the Facebook presence was as a marketing or information tool on services or newbooks or event advertising (Temasek, Singapore Poly, Ngee Ann, NTU, NLB, ), in the case of SMU they explicitly chose to use it purely for social interaction and to use other mediums for promotion. Temasek had an interactive booth at its entrance with various features including an auto-photo link to Facebook.

Libraries also created posters to share around campus advertising new books, events or other services. A particularly cool idea was that of the off-site or on-site book fair. In the case of Ngee Ann, as they are affiliated with the Ngee Ann shopping centre, they hold a big book fair in the shopping centre, where vendors put books on display for sale. Students can then go and browse and “purchase” a book, if it is not already in the library catalogue, it is then purchased by the poly, processed and immediately loaned to the student.

Some of the libraries (UWCSEA, Ngee Ann, NLB) had a bookcrossing / read and recycle programme which both helped promote the library and literacy, but also helped with the recycling of weeded library materials. The NLB has a huge public booksale each year which is very well received by the public.

Since libraries are moving towards more digital material, they also needed to make the digital collections visible through signage or links on their websites, in the facebook or other social media pages or other posters.