Utah State University Libraries Collection Development Guidelines

Utah State University is a comprehensive doctoral university and the State of Utah’s land-grant university. The University Libraries are committed to promoting the University’s mission of serving the community through learning, discovery, and engagement. The Merrill–Cazier Library is the University’s primary research library, supporting research, teaching, and learning for faculty and students on the Logan campus as well as at all USU regional campuses and centers. The Libraries are also committed to the University’s land-grant mission and strives to provide information resources to the people of the State of Utah, as far they are able within legal and budgetary limitations. The Libraries collect materials broadly across all subjects in order to contribute to general education in all University disciplines, but they primarily focus on the specific areas in which USU faculty members conduct research or direct the learning of graduate and undergraduate students. The Libraries strive to represent a diversity of perspectives in the collections and their related services while working to fulfill the University’s mission.

The following guidelines describe the broad collecting philosophy driving the Libraries’ acquisition of materials. This document also provides a high-level overview of budget sources, format preferences, and acquisition policies. It is not intended to provide subject-level guidance for the content acquired. Exceptions to any aspect of these guidelines may be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Collections Budgets

Collecting Guidelines

The Libraries apply a number of evaluative criteria to ensure that they are providing the most appropriate materials to support the University’s mission. For all acquisitions, they consider the following:

• Relevance to the research and teaching needs of current faculty and students
• Currency of information
• Appropriateness of content level
• Quality of publisher and authority of author
• Language of publication (English is generally preferred, with the exception of materials supporting language instruction)
• Price and price model
• Demand by local users
• Redundancy with current collections holdings

When considering electronic formats, the Libraries also evaluate the following:

• Effectiveness and functionality of the interface
• Provision of perpetual and archival rights
• Licensing requirements and restrictions
• Technical requirements including operating systems, authentication mechanisms, and browser support
• Provision of usage statistics
• Guarantees of patron data privacy
• Accessibility provisions per the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)

The Libraries reserve the right to reject adding materials—including freely available resources— to their collections based on their perceived quality, authoritativeness, relevance, or other criteria.

Consortial Relationships

The Libraries’ approach to collection development relies heavily on Utah State University’s participation in consortial relationships. Chief among these is USU’s membership in the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA), which greatly expands patrons’ access to materials beyond the Libraries’ local collections. The Libraries justify their strong focus on demonstrated, immediate local needs because GWLA’s 39 member libraries provide ready access to over 70 million items, with 4-day interlibrary loan delivery benchmarks. By reciprocally contributing USU’s materials for discovery and use by other GWLA members, the Libraries both maximize their purchasing power to add materials to their own collections and improve their patrons’ access to additional research collections. Shared purchasing and licensing agreements also maximize local staff time.

A similar arrangement with the smaller Utah Academic Library Consortium (UALC) generates further cost savings and fosters a view of the Libraries’ shared collections as a single resource. Comprising all academic libraries in the state, UALC offers reciprocal borrowing agreements among member institutions, which allows USU students and faculty to check out physical books when visiting any campus. GWLA has similar agreements in place, but the close proximity of UALC member institutions to USU makes this benefit more readily available in the state.

The Libraries participate in several other initiatives to broaden their constituents’ access to research collections as well as allow the Libraries to make deselection decisions with more confidence. Among these are membership in HathiTrust and the Western Regional Storage Trust:

• HathiTrust is a partnership of over 150 major research institutions working to build a shared digital collection of library materials. The collection serves as a reliable archive for member institutions and makes millions of items available in digital format to their patrons. HathiTrust also provides accessible digital copies of library materials to patrons who have print disabilities. More information on HathiTrust is available at https://www.hathitrust.org/partnership.
• The Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST) is a distributed retrospective print journal repository that preserves the scholarly record while also allowing member institutions to reclaim space in their facilities and maintain reliable access to deaccessioned titles. More information on WEST is available at https://www.cdlib.org/services/west/.

Formats

Books reach the Libraries through several acquisition channels. The Libraries receive print and electronic books through the traditional methods of approval plans and firm orders, as well as newer methods such as demand-driven processes and access to shared collections through interlibrary loan. In order to ensure that the collections target USU faculty and student needs, the Libraries have minimized “just in case” purchasing. Prospective buying focuses on meeting USU’s core research and teaching needs. Newer purchasing models provide rapid access to content and at the faculty, researcher, or student’s point of need. Where necessary, patrons can use the Libraries’ Suggest a Purchase form to request titles not available on demand.

Books

The Libraries acquire materials in a variety of formats. Generally, they prefer to acquire an electronic rather than a tangible copy of a title for their general collections whenever possible, in order to meet the need to access current materials regardless of patrons’ physical locations. The Libraries will purchase print titles and other tangible formats when not available electronically, at the request of patrons, or when librarians prefer it. On a case-by-case basis, the Libraries may consider purchasing an additional copy of an item already owned in another format.

Approval Plans

The Libraries maintain a small approval program with a national book vendor. This profile attempts to prospectively identify titles with characteristics that align with USU’s academic programs. The approval profile is supported out of a separate and central book fund. While the profile is e-book preferred, it also results in print-book purchases in certain disciplines and when the e-book is not immediately available. Liaison librarians are responsible for profiling appropriate approval plans to meet the needs of their assigned departments and for periodically reviewing the materials received as well as the profiles themselves.

Demand-Driven Acquisitions

Demand-driven acquisitions of electronic and print books allow the Libraries to stretch the collections budget to provide immediate access, through the Library Catalog, to a much wider variety of content than they could purchase prospectively. They import bibliographic records for electronic and print books in all subjects into the online catalog, adding new content on a regular basis. Patrons can immediately access e-books from these records, triggering a purchase only after substantial interaction with an individual title. Similarly, patrons can place a request directly from the catalog after viewing the record for an unowned print book, with delivery time varying according to the item requested. These purchase models supplement patrons’ ability to submit book requests to their liaison librarian and allow patrons to drive more of the Libraries’ acquisitions.

Firm Orders

The subject liaison for each academic department annually receives a small budget allocation, which is used at his or her discretion to prospectively acquire materials (books and media) for that department or fulfill requests. The budgets are based on historic spending but are reevaluated annually based on changes in departmental programs, curriculum, and research. Subject liaisons are responsible for becoming familiar with the research conducted and courses taught in their assigned departments. Subject liaisons then identify recently published and core book titles directly supporting the current teaching and research at Utah State to consider purchasing prospectively. Subject liaisons are responsible for determining whether firm order books are acquired in print or electronic format, although electronic format is strongly encouraged.

Purchase on Demand

The Libraries allocate funds annually to a purchasing model called the purchase-on-demand (POD) program. Through this program, the Libraries initiate rush purchase requests instead of borrowing from another library when interlibrary loan requests are received for recently published books that meet established criteria related to cost and quality.

Journal and Database Subscriptions

The Libraries maintain funds for journal and database subscriptions that are separate from those used for one-time purchases. The Libraries manage these funds centrally rather than allocating them by discipline. These “serial” subscriptions, for mostly electronic content, consume a considerable portion of the Libraries’ budget, which means that recurring and inflationary costs limit the ability to add titles on demand in the same way that they do for monographic or other one-time purchases. The Libraries pursue innovative avenues for paid article-level access and other approaches to managing rising subscription costs.

Faculty members who would like to request new serial subscriptions should contact their subject liaison, who can then work with Collections Management to review the request. Generally, the addition of a serial title requires the cancellation of another title of equal or greater cost. The Libraries regularly review the management of both bundled journal packages and individually subscribed titles.

Other Policies

Textbook Policy

It is the general policy of the USU Libraries not to purchase copies of textbooks or solutions manuals. The Libraries define a textbook as a book used as a standard work for the study of a particular subject in a classroom environment. However, not all texts used for instructional purposes are textbooks. For example, many titles published by university presses lend themselves to adoption in classroom instruction, but such titles are not textbooks and the Libraries may acquire them. Additionally, this policy does not apply to supplemental reading materials, most of which would ordinarily be acquired for the collections.

Open Access and Affordable Learning Resources

The USU Libraries works to support publishing initiatives such as Open Access (OA) that make scholarship more readily available to researchers as well as affordable to students. The Libraries provide direct access to freely available e-journals, e-books, and websites where these conform to their collecting guidelines.

As a specific area of OA, the Libraries work to support USU’s affordable-learning initiatives, including Open Educational Resources. Libraries staff assist instructors in adopting low- or no-cost textbooks and other course materials that save students money, which promotes students’ retention, completion, and attainment of course learning outcomes. The Libraries often add these materials to the Library Catalog to facilitate discovery by other patrons.

The Libraries actively encourage USU researchers to make the results of their research publicly available. They offer limited financial support to faculty who wish to publish in fully OA journals that charge publications fees, and the Libraries’ institutional repository serves as an outlet for authors to archive a version of their published research so that it is available as part of the Libraries’ collections and freely accessible online. Further information about the Libraries’ OA fund and the University’s OA policy are available at https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/oadc/6/ .

Audiovisual Media

The Libraries maintain a small budget for audiovisual media requests, which is centrally administered. The Libraries generally do not acquire any media prospectively, relying on faculty requests to build this part of the collections. The Libraries will fulfill individual requests to purchase media items up to the currently established price cap. Academic departments or teaching faculty must assume costs exceeding this if the Libraries are to proceed with the acquisition. The Libraries prefer to acquire DVDs or other physical media for individual face-to-face course screenings or when streaming rights are unavailable or unreasonably priced. The Libraries prefer to pursue streaming rights when they can be acquired in perpetuity or when the medium is to be used in settings other than face-to-face instruction.

The Libraries will advise faculty members on their rights and responsibilities when streaming media for educational purposes and will research the availability of streaming rights for the requested content. Balancing instructional need, copyright restrictions, and cost, the Library may choose one of several options for media access. Please see the Library’s policy on Digital Media for Instructional Purposes for specific information, including current price caps for media acquisitions.

Materials for Individual Use

Certain materials, by their nature, lend themselves to use by a single researcher. Such materials may include data sets, psychological tests and measures, and others like them. The Library generally does not acquire this type of resource and considers them the responsibility of the individual patron or his/her academic unit. If a resource has a demonstrated, broad, multidisciplinary value or is consistently used for student work, the Library reserves the right to consider such products on a case-by-case basis.

Engineering standards are an example of an item the Libraries often purchase at the request of an individual researcher. Because limited funds support the purchase of standards, Libraries staff will pursue an alternative to an expensive standard if it will meet the requester’s needs. The Libraries add purchased standards to its collections rather than transferring ownership to the individual requester.

Leisure Materials

The primary function of the University Libraries is to support research and teaching; however, they also maintain a limited collection of popular books and media to provide leisure-reading opportunities for students, faculty, and staff. These materials are primarily funded through student fees.

Deaccessioning

The Libraries will from time to time engage in “weeding,” or deaccessioning items from its collections. The primary reason for weeding is to make it easier for patrons to find and use the collections’ highest-quality materials by removing those that are outdated or less relevant. They may also weed in accordance with other standard best practices.

The process of deaccessioning will be data driven and managed at the discretion of the Head of Collections Management, who makes the final determination of items to keep or discard. Relevant Libraries staff will set criteria appropriate to each discipline, including publication date, checkout history, physical condition, and importance of the author or work to the field. Liaison librarians responsible for subject areas being weeded will help determine these criteria as well as the exceptions made for specific items. The Libraries may, at their discretion, solicit feedback from patrons.

Academic Freedom

The Utah State University Libraries support the American Library Association’s Freedom to Read statement, including that “It is in the public interest for publishers and librarians to make available the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those that are unorthodox, unpopular, or considered dangerous by the majority” (ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/freedomreadstatement). As an institution of higher education, Utah State University enacts similar policy promoting academic freedom, or “the right to teach, study, discuss, investigate, discover, create, and publish freely” (usu.edu/policies/403). Inclusion of materials in its collections does not imply the Libraries’ or the University’s endorsement of their perspectives. The Libraries reserve the right to add to or remove from its collections according to the professional judgement of its employees and will not entertain requests to censor or limit patrons’ access to materials.

Gifts

The Merrill-Cazier Library no longer accepts general gifts-in-kind, as of September 1, 2017. After considerable evaluation, and based on a diverse array of reasons—among which are the costs associated with evaluating and processing gifts, and the small percentage of gifts that are added to the collections each year—the program was ended.

While the Libraries no longer accept general gifts, Special Collections & Archives continues actively engaging with donors interested in contributing to their areas of collecting emphasis and enhancing their unique holdings. Potential donors should contact Clint Pumphrey, Interim Head of Special Collections & Archives, to discuss further at (435) 797-0891, or clint.pumphrey@usu.edu.

Approved September 9, 2022, by Jennifer Duncan, Dean of USU Libraries