Seeking Approval(s)

Do blogs and book approval plans go together? At first glance they don’t seem like a natural pair, but I’m giving it a try.

McMaster has been without approval plans for the better part of a decade. Our first venture back into approvals started last year with a small profile for our Business library. Since going live, the plan has supplied about 200 books and valuable experience in making the process work.

Now we’re looking to expand the use of approval plans to cover a broader range of Social Science and Humanities subjects. I spent a lot of time last summer and fall combing through historical acquisition statistics, revised collection policies and program changes, and vendor “retro” reports. It was actually quite interesting to review our purchasing patterns and puzzle over why we might buy lots of books in one LC class range and almost nothing in the adjacent ones (and whether we should be buying in those, too…).

With a draft approval profile created, it was time to test. The folks at YBP worked their magic and set our plan running in “virtual” mode. This is a great way to refine the profile since we get results using live data but not books (YBP supplies our books shelf-ready–a.k.a., non-returnable).

Here’s where the blog comes in. I was casting about for an easy way to get the results out to our Liaison Librarians and collect their comments. Preferably one that didn’t involve a lot of e-mail going back and forth. What I finally came up with was creating a blog on our local WordPress site where I could post the new results each week. Posting is a simple copy and paste, all of the Liaisons have quick access to the results, and comments are easy to associate with the right batch of titles. The blog was also a handy place to stash the various parts of the profile, so there is always context for the results.

I’m curious to see how this particular blend of library operations with web 2.0 technology works out!