INFO 266-01
INFO 266-10
COLLECTION MANAGEMENT
Spring 2019 Syllabus

Joni Richards Bodart
E-mail
Phone: (408) 924-2728

Canvas Information: Courses will be available beginning January 24th, 6 am PT unless you are taking an intensive or a one-unit or two-unit class that starts on a different day. In that case, the class will open on the first day that the class meets.

You will be enrolled in the Canvas site automatically.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Study of collection management in all types of libraries and information centers. Includes analysis of information needs, criteria for selection, collection use evaluation, and resources for collection development.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

Office Hours
I will be in my office by appointment, Clark Hall, 418H, and will be on campus some weekdays, however, without an appointment, there’s no guarantee I will actually be IN my office.

I will answer e-mail on a daily basis or as quickly as I can. I will also be posting email responses to the FAQs section of the discussion board when questions are asked that are of interest to the whole class.

If you need to speak to me by phone, I will do all I can to be available to you, but scheduling that call in advance to make it convenient for both of us, and ensure that I have enough time cleared to respond to your questions or problems.

DISCLAIMER
I make every effort to proofread the Syllabus and the Canvas website, but errors can occur. Please contact me with any errors you see or any questions you may have so I can correct or explain them.

Instructional Philosophy
I want each of you in this course to succeed, and I will do everything I can to help you do so, but this is a partnership. Please make sure that communication is your top priority during the semester. Ask questions when you have them, seek clarifications when you need them, and take responsibility for understanding all expectations, content and assignments for the course. You are responsible for your own learning experience. I do not make you succeed. YOU make you succeed. You also make you fail. Understanding the contents and expectations explained in the Syllabus is critical for a student’s success in the class.

The Canvas Site
Please check the site regularly for announcements, discussion board questions, and so on. As soon as you are enrolled, go to the site, read my welcome message, then go to the discussion board and introduce yourself, both professionally and personally. I will give you a format for each part of your introduction. If you read someone’s introduction and think that you would like to work with them on a team, you are welcome to contact them either on that forum or privately and form your team immediately. The purpose of these introductions is to allow you to see who else is in class and if anyone wants to write about the same kind of library or library/team of customers that you would like to work on, making the process of creating teams easier and shorter.

Explore the various forums for other information I think might be helpful to you, such as resources and links to sites you will find useful, and survival tips from previous classes. And make sure you take a look at the policy manuals given as examples. I have posted advice/survival tips from previous classes under Course Information. Please take a look at it, as I think it will be helpful. I will ask you to add to these tips at the end of the semester, and your comments will be very valuable to me and to future students as I continue to develop this course. Tips about your experience with the asynchronous format will be very important to future students.

IF YOU ARE FEELING OVERWHELMED

Feeling overwhelmed when you read this syllabus is normal.  Take a look at some of the survival tips and final papers/reflection papers and discover that you aren’t the first person to feel this way.  You have a huge job to do, putting together a whole policy manual, but you will not be working on your own.  Your team will work with you, and you will all support each other.  I am available to help you in any way I can.  Go over this syllabus carefully and slowly—it should answer most of your questions.  If you read it quickly, you will miss important details.  Come to the Introductions session on January 29th, so you can ask your questions in person and meet some of the people you will be working with on teams and in groups.  Get your introduction posted as soon as possible, and then respond to others’ posts so you can get onto a team as soon as possible, and start creating your library.  Once you realize that your huge project is divided into more easily digestible sections, and then you can figure out how to work most effectively with your small discussion group and your policy manual team, you will begin to see the big picture, and it won’t feel so huge and overwhelming any longer.

LECTURE INFORMATION—ZOOM RECORDINGS

Lecture information will be given via Zoom lectures.  I will be doing a mini-lecture, 30-45 minutes, on each of the chapters of your policy manual, to let you know what I think the most important concepts are. These lectures include information not in your texts. All Zoom sessions will be prerecorded for asynchronous viewing and posted to the website on the Modules page as soon as they are recorded.  If you have questions about the content presented, you will need to post them on the FAQ forum.

There will be eleven (prerecorded without an audience) Zoom sessions, one for each chapter in your policy manual, plus one additional live Introduction/Information session. All are required, and all but the first Q&A/information session are asynchronous. The links to them and the PowerPoints that go with each of them will be posted on the website.

The session for Q&A, introduction to the course, and information about the syllabus, the class website, and changes in the format of the class, will be on January 29, from 630-900 PM, Pacific time.  It will be recorded and the link provided on the website.  You will be able to watch the other lectures at your convenience.  All lectures are required and do contain content not included in your textbooks.  You will be responsible for their content, just as you are the content of your textbooks, and will use them to help your PM Team to create your policy manual.  Students from previous classes have strongly recommended that you make every effort to be present for this introductory session, so you can ask your questions and make sure that they have been answered to your satisfaction.  Since this is the only synchronous meeting we will be having, I think it’s really important to there in person.  This may be your only chance to see each other and me in person, and to communicate with more than just your words—facial expression, body language, personality, and so on.  These things can give you lots of clues about the people you will be interacting with during the semester.

This scheduling and the due dates for assignments should inform your reading of the texts, articles on Canvas site, and outside readings. There is also a class organization document on the website with information on what you should be doing week by week.

ASSIGNMENTS

ASSIGNMENT 1—CLASS PARTICIPATION—SMALL GROUP DISCUSSIONS AND WHOLE CLASS DISCUSSIONS (CLOs 1-9)

Read text and participate in class discussions on discussion boards. While I may comment from time to time, these conversations are student-driven.  However, I will be keeping track of them to record your participation. Participate is defined as participating and contributing your ideas and opinions on your small group discussion forums, and posting at least once on the main topic forums.   There will be five topics for the discussion boards that are listed below.

The class will be sorted into random small discussion groups.  Students MUST participate in the small group discussions.  These discussion groups begin immediately as soon as the class websites open.  Students in each small discussion group will discuss the topic at hand, and post the articles and book chapters they consider most important or valuable during the first week of discussion.  SDG members will look at articles and give feedback on them, including which are most important/most valuable (1-2).  At the end of the week, each group will post a summary of the of the most important/valuable article or chapter to the main discussion board for that topic, and students in the other groups will comment at least once on these posts in addition to their small group posts.  Each small discussion group session and each whole class discussion will last one week.  I will be reading the small group forums, but most likely will not be commenting regularly on them. 

To summarize—one week you will discuss the topic of the week in small groups, and decide which resources were most valuable.  The next week the leader from each small group will summarize comments on most valuable resource and rationales for that choice and post that information to the general discussion board on that topic.  (The group leader has been randomly selected for the first topic of the semester after introductions/team formation, which is Acquisitions.  After that, each group will decide on a schedule for the rest of the semester.)  The whole class discussions will last a second week.  More information is available on the appropriately named forum.

SDG that reported having effective interaction during the semester were the ones that had taken time at the beginning of the semester to get organized.  They scheduled a first meeting immediately after the Introductory Zoom session, and scheduled the leader for each topic and the procedures the group would use during the whole semester.  Students who contributed the most to these groups were the ones who got the most out of them.  These groups are randomly formed, and heterogeneous, in direct contrast to the PM teams, which are homogenous in terms of type of library/areas of interest.  SDG are designed to give each student a chance to discuss course materials with a small group of people with more diversity than the PM teams give. 

When SDG contribute their best articles to the whole class discussion, they will submit no more than 2 articles or chapters.  These are the ones that each SDG feels are the most valuable to the rest of the class.  You will need to go beyond your textbooks to find recent articles or book chapters that you feel are valuable to draw to the attention of the SDG. Your textbooks are not appropriate for this assignment.

Comments should be thoughtful and insightful, adding to our mutual learning process, and should NOT recapitulate what others have said. And while you do need to keep on top of the discussion boards, it is fine if you have a lot to say about one topic, and post more than the required number, and then have less to say on the next one, and do fewer. I will be looking at the average numbers over the semester. But if you regularly don’t post or post too few, I will notice. Please note that Canvas allows me to access statistics for students, and I’ll be able to count easily the number of your original posts and responses to others’ posts. When responding to discussion questions, please do include the name of the person whose post you are responding to.

The flow of these groups should look like this:  research, read, and discuss articles/chapters on the topic at hand in your small groups.  Select 1-2 to share with whole class.  Discuss with the whole class the articles you found most useful, and ask questions of the person/group who presented it if you have questions about it.  Discuss articles that pertain to your policy manual with your PM (policy manual) team, and use these discussions to inform your creation of various chapters in the manual. Therefore, info will flow from small groups to whole class, then after whole class discussion, will flow to the various PM teams listed on the Google doc.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE FAQS FORUM IS AN EXCEPTION TO THIS, AND I WILL BE KEEPING TRACK OF IT.  IF YOU WANT A RESPONSE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE, PLEASE EMAIL ME DIRECTLY, AND I WILL GET TO IT AS PROMPTLY AS I CAN.  Students are also welcome to respond to FAQs when they know the answers.  If a student’s answer to the question is correct, I will not comment further.

ASSIGNMENT 2--POLICY MANUAL TEAMWORK (CLOs 1-9)
You must work as a team member with the others in your team, using email, your discussion board, Google Docs, Google Hangouts, or other software. You are welcome to meet f2f if that is possible, but it is not required. You are REQUIRED to be a member of a team for this class. Teams will be made up of 4-5 members, but additional members may be added to ensure that everyone in the class is on a team studying the type of library or information organization that they prefer.

Teams will be formed during the first two weeks of the semester, using a discussion forum and a Google doc to which each team will contribute. Classes vary from one semester to another in both size and personality, so please be aware that it may or may not go completely smoothly. Your patience is greatly appreciated. These are the steps I would like you to follow:

1. Go to Introductions/Team Building forum, and introduce yourself as required, and give some details about the kind of library (public, school, college, university, archive, museum, law or other special library) you would like to write about and how you function as a team member, including strengths and weaknesses.
2. Read the introductions, and contact anyone you would like to work with or anyone who is interested in writing about the same kind of library you are interested in working on. You may do this either privately or on the discussion forum. It will be easier if you are all proactive about this, rather than sitting back and waiting to see what happens.
3. Once you have agreed to work with one or two other people, post the information about your team on the Google doc set up for that purpose. There is a link to the doc on the website under Modules. Once you have posted that information, you will officially be a team, and so noted in my records. You will need to include in your post to the Google doc: team number, type of library, name of library, team members’ first and last names, and the name of the team member who will be submitting the different parts of your policy manual.  All the chapters in the policy manual will be submitted by the same person in each team. This information does not have to be submitted all at one time.  You can continue to add members until you have either 4 or 5.  You need to add your team number, team members, and type of library as soon as your team forms, to make your team official, and then you can go back over the next few days and add the additional information as your team makes decisions about their process and content. 

Some of you have probably done team projects before, and have not enjoyed them. I highly recommend that you take a look at Dr. Haycock's presentation on working in virtual teams. (There is a link to it under the Course Documents section of the Content area.) This will give you lots of hints on how to create a successful virtual team. You will also find suggestions from previous classes under Course Information.

Finally, I am happy to report that negative team experiences in this class are definitely in the minority. If you do your prep, follow the student suggestions about creating a successful team, take a look at the video, and stay in close touch with your teammates, it is very unlikely that you will be part of that minority.   The key here is regular and open conversations about what is going on in team member’s lives that could impact your progress.  Share problems, share joys, and work together.  You also need to communicate about your manual, in order to take care of problems while they are small, and ensure that everyone gets a chance to express their ideas.  THE KEY TO A SUCCESSFUL GROUP EXPERIENCE IS CONSTANT AND CONSISTENT COMMUNICATION ABOUT YOUR PM PROJECT AND ABOUT WHAT IS GOING ON IN YOUR PERSONAL/NONSTUDENT LIFE THAT COULD INTERFERE WITH THAT PROJECT.

IF YOU HAVE TO DROP THE CLASS AT SOME POINT DURING THE SEMESTER, PLEASE LET ME AND YOUR TEAM MEMBERS KNOW RIGHT AWAY.  If you decide to “opt out” without formally dropping the class, please let me and your team members know.  It is very disconcerting to email and text someone who is still in the class but doesn’t respond.  I will not ask for explanations about why you no longer want to contribute—that is your prerogative.  But it is polite to let your colleagues and me know of your decision.  If you have a nonresponsive team member, please let me know at once.  I will email that person, and check on what is going on.  If I get no response, I will instruct the rest of the team to continue on without them, noting which chapters they contributed to, and when they stopped participating.  Grades will be based on how much work was and was not done.  If you do not contribute to an assignment, your grade will be zero (not F) for that assignment. 

It is up to the members of each team to work out interpersonal problems. I am available for advice and consultation, but it is ultimately up to the team members to figure out how to work together successfully and ensure that everyone contributes equally. You will spend a good part of your professional life as part of one team or another, and knowing how to be a good team player, both in contributing and convincing others to contribute, is essential. This semester will give you a chance to practice that.

ASSIGNMENT 3—SMALL GROUP/TEAM EVALUATIONS (CLOs 1-9)

At the end of the semester, after you have turned in your policy manual, you will be required to evaluate your PM team members, and the members of your SDG, on their participation and the quality of work that they contributed to the project.  You will also evaluate your own performance, so that every team/group member has an individual evaluation.  These evaluations will be incorporated into the participation grade. You will submit this document via the assignments dropbox. THIS IS AN INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT, NOT A TEAM ASSIGNMENT.  ALL CONTENT WILL BE KEPT CONFIDENTIAL.

Please note that there are two different sections to the evaluation paper, because you are evaluating two different groups of people, and both are informal, and should be written in first person.  Both should include paragraphs on:

• How the group/team worked together, and whether that process improved or deteriorated over the course of the semester
• How roles in the group/team were assigned, and how those roles did or did not contribute to the group/team’s progress toward their goal.
• One paragraph or more on each group/team member discussing their individual role(s) in the group, and how their contributions helped or hindered the group process.

ASSIGNMENT 4—SYNTHESIS AND REFLECTION PAPER (CLOs 1-9)

This assignment also has two parts.  The first is a chance for you to look back on the ideas and theories you have studied this semester, and how they affected your thinking and philosophy concerning collection development/management.  What ideas are most/least important to you now?  What new ideas have you espoused?  Which old ideas have you moved past or enlarged on or rejected as no longer fitting you?  Are there differences between how you define and conceptualize CD/M now and how you did so before taking this class?  Which concepts are most/least important to you now?

The second section is to reflect on the semester and what you gained from it.  You have already explained what CD/M means to you and how you conceptualize it.  Now I’d like you to look at how you have changed at a deeper level.  What do you know about yourself that you didn’t know when the semester started?  What parts of the class were most useful to you?  Least useful?  Most/least fun?  Most/least creative?    What were your fears and expectations when the class began, and did they play out? I have reworked a number of the assignments—did you find any that seemed to be more/less effective?  I want you to reflect on this semester, just like you will need to reflect on your whole program when you do 289.  Do you feel differently about collection management than you did at the first of the semester?  What have you learned?  How have you changed?  How will you apply the knowledge you gained during the semester?  You will need to do this reflection process for each class you took in your program, as you prep for taking 289.  This assignment gives you a chance to practice that.

This is an informal paper, so there aren’t a lot of rules and requirements.  You may write in the first person, and in an informal style, but you still need to write at a graduate level. 

ASSIGNMENT DUE DATES 
All assignments are due on Sundays before midnight. This means the midnight between Sunday and Monday, not between Saturday and Sunday. Week 1 is the first week of the semester and is not a full seven days, and begins on 1/24/18. Week 2 is the following week, starting on Monday the 28th, and so on.  Weeks always start on Mondays, so the Sunday for each week is at the end of the week, and is followed by Monday of the NEXT week.

SINCE YOU DON’T HAVE AN ASSIGNMENT DUE EVERY WEEK, DATES BELOW DO NOT INCLUDE EVERY WEEK IN THE SEMESTER.

• Week 4, 2/17
  Chapters 1-4
• Description of the Library Building and its Collection
• Collection Development Statement and Rationale
• Community Assessment Methods and Survey Results
• Types of Materials Available
• Week 6, 3/3
  Chapter 5
• Selection Procedures
• Week 7, 3/10
  Chapter 6
• Review Sources
• Week 8, 3/17
  Chapter 7
• Acquisition Procedures
• Week 9, 3/24
  Chapter 8
• Budget
• Week 10, 3/31
  Chapter 9
• Evaluation and Weeding Procedures
• Week 11, 4/14
  Chapter 10
• Merchandising and Promoting your Collection
• Week 12, 4/21
  Chapter 11
• Reconsideration Policy and Procedures
• Week 14, 5/5
• Informal paper—Synthesis and Reflections
• Evaluations of PM team, and evaluations of SDG

I am willing to be flexible about due dates and will always give you extra time when you ask for it. However, any assignment that does not come in on time when no extension has been requested will be penalized one letter grade for lateness. When in doubt, ask for more time, just in case. You have a huge project before you, and my due dates are designed to keep you caught up, so you don’t have too many things overwhelming you at the end of the semester.  However, since I don’t know your personal schedules, or the assignment schedules for other classes, I have not taken them into account, and overlapping may occur.

You will also need to be sure that links work, that you have submitted the correct file, and that I can access your work.  This is ESSENTIAL at the end of the semester, when I must meet the deadline for grades to be submitted, and cannot give any extensions.

If you create a website for your assignments, and send me a URL when they are due so I can look at them, and if I cannot open the link, I will let you know about the problem right away, and it MUST be corrected within 48 hours of my email, or your work will be counted as late. Please check your links, and make sure you have published or opened your site so I can examine your work, and check your email to see if I have let you know that there are problems. 

ALL DELAYED OR LATE ASSIGNMENTS MUST BE IN TO ME WITHOUT EXCEPTION NO LATER THAN MIDNIGHT, 12 AM, ON MAY 17  IN ORDER TO SUBMIT GRADES ON TIME. I am willing to be as flexible as I can, but the due date for grade submission MUST be met.

GRADES ARE NOT ROUNDED UP.  This means that if you get 95.7, your grade is 95. 

Grading Allocations

• 25% Outside readings and web work used in SDG group assignment and posted on SDG and WCD discussion forums 
• 50% Individual chapters of policy manual, averaged together (PM team assignment)
• 25% Class participation—small group evaluations, team evaluations, and informal paper

COURSE ORGANIZATION (on Modules page)

A document detailing the workload for each week is on the course website.

A document giving detailed description of each assignment and its due date is on the course website.

Assignments will be listed on the course calendar on course website.

PLEASE NOTE THAT LOTS OF INFORMATION THAT CLARIFIES THE ASSIGNMENTS AND COURSE ORGANIZATION HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM THE SYLLABUS AND PLACED ON THE COURSE WEBSITE.  IF YOU SEE CONFUSING STATEMENTS AND/OR ERRORS, PLEASE LET ME KNOW SO THEY CAN BE CORRECTED.

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Course Workload Expectations

Success in this course is based on the expectation that students will spend, for each unit of credit, a minimum of forty-five hours over the length of the course (normally 3 hours per unit per week with 1 of the hours used for lecture) for instruction or preparation/studying or course related activities including but not limited to internships, labs, clinical practica. Other course structures will have equivalent workload expectations as described in the syllabus.

Instructional time may include but is not limited to:
Working on posted modules or lessons prepared by the instructor; discussion forum interactions with the instructor and/or other students; making presentations and getting feedback from the instructor; attending office hours or other synchronous sessions with the instructor.

Student time outside of class:
In any seven-day period, a student is expected to be academically engaged through submitting an academic assignment; taking an exam or an interactive tutorial, or computer-assisted instruction; building websites, blogs, databases, social media presentations; attending a study group;contributing to an academic online discussion; writing papers; reading articles; conducting research; engaging in small group work.

Course Prerequisites

INFO 202, INFO 204. 

Course Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

1. Exhibit familiarity with the theoretical and practical issues of resource selection and collection management for libraries and information centers.
2. Describe the role and value of collection management and its relationship to other library functions.
3. Describe the major forms of cooperative (shared) collection development.
4. Develop a rationale for planning the development and management of a collection.
5. Assess user information needs in the context of collection management.
6. Identify and evaluate literature and other resources pertinent to materials selection and collection management.
7. Apply methodologies and skills for selecting resources and evaluating and managing a collection.
8. Create and evaluate collection policies.
9. Identify the challenges and issues of collection management, such as ownership and access, cultural sensitivity, copyright, and censorship.

Core Competencies (Program Learning Outcomes)

INFO 266 supports the following core competencies:

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Textbooks

Required Textbooks:

• Disher, W. (2014). Crash course in collection development (2nd ed.). Libraries Unlimited. Available through Amazon: 1610698134

• Johnson, P. (2018). Fundamentals of collection development and management (4th ed.). ALA. Available through Amazon: 0838916414

Recommended Textbooks:

• Albitz, B., Avery, C., & Zabel,D. (Eds.). (2014). Rethinking collection development and management. Libraries Unlimited. Available through Amazon: 1610693051

• Evans, G. E., & Saponaro, M.Z. (2012). Collection management basics. Libraries Unlimited. Available through Amazon: 1598848631

• Loertscher, D., & Crompton, M. (2018). Collection and connection development using the collection mapping technique: A guide for librarians (3rd ed.). Learning Commons Press. Available from publisher LMC Source

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Grading Scale

The standard SJSU School of Information Grading Scale is utilized for all iSchool courses:

In order to provide consistent guidelines for assessment for graduate level work in the School, these terms are applied to letter grades:

• C represents Adequate work; a grade of "C" counts for credit for the course;
• B represents Good work; a grade of "B" clearly meets the standards for graduate level work or undergraduate (for BS-ISDA);
  For core courses in the MLIS program (not MARA, Informatics, BS-ISDA) — INFO 200, INFO 202, INFO 204 — the iSchool requires that students earn a B in the course. If the grade is less than B (B- or lower) after the first attempt you will be placed on administrative probation. You must repeat the class if you wish to stay in the program. If - on the second attempt - you do not pass the class with a grade of B or better (not B- but B) you will be disqualified.
  
• A represents Exceptional work; a grade of "A" will be assigned for outstanding work only.

Graduate Students are advised that it is their responsibility to maintain a 3.0 Grade Point Average (GPA). Undergraduates must maintain a 2.0 Grade Point Average (GPA).

University Policies

Per University Policy S16-9, university-wide policy information relevant to all courses, such as academic integrity, accommodations, etc. will be available on Office of Graduate and Undergraduate Programs' Syllabus Information web page at: https://www.sjsu.edu/curriculum/courses/syllabus-info.php. Make sure to visit this page, review and be familiar with these university policies and resources.

In order to request an accommodation in a class please contact the Accessible Education Center and register via the MyAEC portal.

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