I have been working with Corporate Affairs here at Queen Mary to integrate Research Publications into the College's stylesheet and template for the Research website. It's been an interesting experience! As part of a broader aim to provide a better range of information for researchers, both internally and externally, I've been asked to provide details of research collections and services for researchers within Library Services. On the surface, this seems simple enough, think about each discipline, identify where there are particular 'strengths' for researchers and how this reflects current research, and bob's your uncle. Right?
Wrong.
OK. Let's break this down a bit...
How do you describe a 'research collection' as distinct from a 'teaching collection'?
What makes a research collection 'strong' or denotes 'quality'?
Is there a shopping list of texts, and other content, that constitute the basis of a good quality research collection in a given discipline?
Would this shopping list, if it existed, provide the minimum that would be required, across the whole discipline, and if so, what else would be needed to provide a truly quality collection?
Where do you begin to review a collection that you already own, to identify what is research relevant?
How do you decide between what is research relevant to your own researchers, and what is research relevant externally?
What happens to the parts of your collection that are not currently research relevant to your institution, but might be relevant externally, or might be relevant in the future? Is this a good enough reason to keep this content, and if so, what opportunities are there for promoting this content to the outside world?
Perhaps the term 'collection' is the problem. A collection is a group of materials. That's it. Just a group of materials. As librarians, we assign all sorts of other criteria to these collections by tacking on other words to describe their content and how they behave. This then changes the definition to meet our needs. Add the terms, 'development' or 'management' to 'collection' and things can get really complicated.
Should a research collection be subject to the same development and management strategies that teaching collections are subject to?
Should a research collection grow over time, because somebody somewhere will need to access something at sometime? Or should the research collection evolve, as teaching collections do, to reflect a change in need, discarding content no longer useful to the institution? Would this still constitute collection development?
Who decides?
Lots of things to consider over the coming months, starting with that shopping list!
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