Afternoon,



Thanks for your very informative responses on this. David and Sheila I have a few queries / responses:



> (DS) Our Collections Development Policy gives us the ability to weed all superseded editions of a title.



Do you have knowledge of how this part of the policy was formulated? Particularly around how you consulted with academic staff involved in teaching or who created reading lists.



I think one of the main stumbling blocks to making the process as lean as possible, is the potential / likelihood of academic intervention, to say they don't want X or Y title weeded. I'm concerned about us, going forward with a regular edition weeding process, being tied up in knots with numerous emails back and forth between ourselves, the Academic Librarians, and the Academic Depts. Any workflow that involves email is a huge bugbear of mine and I want to avoid it at all costs.



> (SC) If an older edition is a core text, we will generally update the Aspire list to include the new edition (where the entire book is recommended reading)



We did that in my previous job but don't do it here. We tend to be extremely cautious about altering any teaching content at all without the explicit consent of the lead academic, which I think is fair enough, given that the academics have picked a text for their own pedagogical reasons etc. Have you ever had an instance where you weeded something, without consulting first, and it caused reputational damage to the library at a later point? I think the risk is low, given the length of some of our lists, but I'll be guided by what our Academic Liaison Manager advises.



> (SC) We are careful to check whether specific chapters have been included in the Aspire list, and if this is the case, will check to see whether the chapter is included in the new edition.



Do you mind me asking who does this part of the work, and an estimate of how much work it entails? Do you have a reading list, collection management, or academic liaison team that deal with the task? Are there handovers between multiple teams to weed items? And when do you do it? As part of some reading list checking / acquiring process, or is it at quieter times of the year?



> (DS) Purchasing new editions in a single bulk order once yearly based on maintaining currency on Reading Lists.



I really like this idea. I think we could definitely borrow (steal!) that approach and run with it, as we're already planning on doing bulk pre-ordering in the summer based on high demand usage stats, and then releasing the orders to our suppliers on August 1st once the Alma rollover has been completed. Wrapping the new editions check into that, and then ignoring it for six months, would make life a lot easier for the Library Assistants. Book ordering is an incredibly transactional process. Anything that reduces or even completely eliminates superfluous and repeated edition checking throughout the year, when faster turnaround is required, would be welcome. I wonder how much time is spent/lost on new edition checks with no action required, just another aggregation of minor losses.



> (DS) One of the biggest problems I find with updating editions on Reading Lists is we have nothing either in the data in Talis Aspire or in our library management system which groups together editions



You could always use the FRBR vector in Primo as a starting point to create your own algorithm, with the aim of holistically concatenating your data, and write some VBA to somehow logically stack it together in a standard desktop programme to analyse and work from...

https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Primo/Product_Documentation/Technical_Guide/040FRBRization/010The_FRBR_Vector

I might also "borrow" any solutions you come up with via this method if that's alright... do let me know how you get on with it :-)



Thanks again,



Kevin









Kevin O’Donovan

Library Acquisitions Manager

Content and Discovery Group

London School of Economics and Political Science

10 Portugal Street

London WC2A 2HD

Email: [log in to unmask] 

Tel: +44(0)20 7852 3683







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