2017 Charleston Library Conference

Rick Lugg, Executive Director, OCLC Sustainable Collection Services, and Bob Nardini, Vice President, Library Services, ProQuest Books, have taken different paths, but once were colleagues at a company called Yankee Book Peddler, where they had something to do with what became routine use of approval plans in all but the smallest North American academic libraries. Pamela Grudzien, Director of Acquisitions, Metadata and Resource Sharing Services at Central Michigan University, oversaw one of those approval plans.
Now Rick runs a business helping libraries incorporate usage data into the management of print book collections, while Bob, still working with approval plans, is at the same time immersed in providing demand-driven collection options. While Pamela still puts some print books onto her shelves, she also works with Rick to take others away.
Over the years Pamela, Rick, and Bob have worked with one another everything changed for academic libraries, their economic, technological, and physical environments; the demands of their users; the nature of their collections; the work of their staffs; and perhaps above all, the culture in which they exist.
They’re not really going to apologize, but Rick and Bob will reflect on all the print books they helped put into libraries through approval plans – many of which they fear haven’t been touched since placed on the shelf. They hope, in this session, Pamela will accept their not-quite-an-apology. Then our speakers will draw on decades of experience to relate how and why so many academic libraries first adopted, and then turned away from or radically changed their library and vendor-driven collection development approach to the user-driven approach still emerging today, while offering thoughts on what librarians starting careers today will see in the years ahead.