In a previous post, I mentioned the creation of a new popular fiction (aka Popular Reading) collection at McMaster. I also mentioned that Vivian Lewis (one of our Associate University Librarians) and I were presenting on the collection at CLA in 2008 and promised further details. Well, the presentation happened…the further details, not so much.

Vivian and I recently did an updated version of our presentation for the library staff at McMaster. We looked at up-to-date circulation statistics and reviewed some of the analysis (and had quizzes/drawings for lovely prizes). It’s been interesting to watch this collection grow and develop and follow the usage patterns. A few of our findings:

The Popular Reading collection is very popular

• Students and staff (and faculty, we assume) are making heavy use of the collection. So much so that 40-50% of the collection is checked out at any given time.
• The most popular titles are into double-digit circulation.

Predicting what will be “popular” is harder than we expected

• When we started the collection, we set out to buy titles that would resonate with students and expected that we would see heavy use in a few key genres (graphic novels, fantasy, science fiction). That didn’t happen. The distribution of circulation by genre is much wider than we’d anticipated. We would never have predicted that Medical Fiction would be in the top 5 genres.
• Some selections are easy, though. If there’s a series of books that are popular in the Young Adult market, it’s a good bet they’ll circulate heavily. Think Harry Potter, the His Dark Materials trilogy, and the Twilight series.
• Users are reading both “literary” and “trashy” titles with equal zeal. The #1 title in our collection is Shopaholic Takes Manhattan. The #2 is A Thousand Splendid Suns. Both had circulated 22 times in our most recent data (Shopaholic has been #1 from the start, and so gets top billing).
• Despite the catchy title of our presentation, Robert Ludlum is not popular with our users. (OK, maybe that wasn’t so hard to predict.)

Don’t be too “librarianish”…

• …was our caution to the audience at CLA, and still holds in our thinking about the collection. Be prepared to live with some ambiguity and don’t try to have all the rules/problems/solutions identified before getting started. Make a few basic policy decisions and figure out the rest as you go.
• Get students involved in making the selections.  Back in August I took a group of our student library assistants on a shopping trip to the campus bookstore. Despite being in the collection only about six months when we pulled our last statistics, some of those books are into double-digit circulation. All of the top five had gone out at least eight times. We’ve also created a very basic form on our website for recommendations.

You don’t need a printing press (or an army of workers) in the basement

• We have a very modest budget for the collection and buy mass-market paperbacks whenever possible. They’re cheap to buy, cheap to replace if they get worn out, and less painful to withdraw if they don’t circulate. Students also like them because they’re small and easy to carry.
• Because the books are widely held by other libraries, cataloguing is readily available. We’ve relaxed some of our standards since we don’t view these books as permanent additions to the collection, and while we want them to be discoverable in the catalogue, we recognize that this is largely a browsing collection.
• Books for the Popular Reading collection follow the same workflow as our regular acquisitions. The few variations in processing have not created problems for us.