Classical and Byzantine Studies Selection Policy

1

Hesburgh Library

University of Notre Dame

Classical and Byzantine Studies Selection Policy

Prepared by: Sarah Bolmarcich

INFO 665, Spring 2010

Drexel University

Table of Contents

ChapterPage

I. Overview4

A. Mission and Goals4

B. Community Served6

i. Demographic Information6

C. Parameters for the Collection7

D. Patron Needs9

II. Details of the Subject Areas and Formats Collected10

A. Users12

B. Formats13

C. Responsible Selectors14

D. Selection Criteria16

E. Recommended Selection Aids17

III. Miscellaneous17

A. Gift Policy17

B. Deselection and Discard Policies17

C. Evaluation Policy18

D. Complaints and Censorship Policy19

IV. Bibliography20

V. Appendices

A. Current Notre Dame Classics Collection Development Policy24

B. Current Hesburgh Library Collection Development Policy28
I. OVERVIEW

A. Mission and Goals. The Notre Dame Classics collection development policy requires revision to meet the changing needs and goals of the Notre Dame Classics Department. The Classics Department recently implemented a long-planned MA degree program, and within the next 10-15 years hopes to implement a PhD program as well (E. Mazurek, personal communication, April 18, 2010). The collection will need to undergo a number of upgrades to serve the department’s planned graduate-level instruction and research. Additionally, the collection development policy, regardless of departmental needs, is somewhat out-of-date: not only is there an undertaking to collect 35 mm videocassettes (Appendix A, 25), but, more seriously, there is little mention of the burgeoning number of electronic resources useful in Classics. The department is especially interested in developing its collections in Greek and Latin literature, Greek history, archaeology, and epigraphy (E. Mazurek, personal communication, April 18, 2010). The Latin and Roman side of the collection is already quite well developed (Appendix A, 26) because current faculty research interests and the department curriculum are concentrated in those areas, and so most of the improvements will focus on Greek studies and on the non-philological literature in classical studies.

Specifically, I recommend that the Classics collection policy upgrade all areas collected to Level 3 from their current Level 1 or 2 (see Appendix A). Hesburgh Library uses the RLG conspectus for collection development (Evans & Saponaro, 2005, 57), which describes Level 3 as:

Instructional Support Level: A collection that in a university is adequate to support undergraduate and most graduate instruction, or sustained independent study; that is, adequate to maintain knowledge of a subject required for limited or generalized purposes, of less than research intensity. It includes a wide range of basic monographs, complete collections of works of more important writers, selections from the works of secondary writers, a selection of representative journals, and reference tools and fundamental bibliographical apparatus pertaining to the subject. In American law collections, this includes comprehensive trade publications and loose-leaf materials, and for foreign law, periodicals and monographs. (Collection Levels (Acquisition) – Library of Congress)

Collecting at this level will ensure adequate research and pedagogical support for the nascent MA program in the Notre Dame Classics Department. While faculty do not always regard Level 3 as adequate for their own research, the RLG Conspectus has generally been found to be valid and useful by academic libraries (Wood & Strauch, Stielow & Tibbo). Although the faculty in their role as researchers would very much like to see the collection developed far beyond Level 3, and arguments can be made for giving library users “what they want” since they are the service population (Rawlinson, 1981), the needs of Notre Dame’s wider community and the library itself must also be considered: to have any area of the Classics collection develop out of proportion to the rest would be detrimental to the whole, as the current situation (with Roman studies predominating) indicates. Rather, we seek to provide users not with what they want but with what is best for the department and its overall mission, just as some libraries invest in “quality” books (cf. Bob, 1982).

To this end, this update of the Classics Collection Development policy is essential. While there is much debate in the field about the need for a collection development policy (Evans & Saponaro, 2005, 50-52; Snow, 1996), a collection that will be in transition for the foreseeable future (as this one will be), requires a collection development policy in order to facilitate communication, make expectations clear, and meet the goal of updating the collection.

B.Community Served. The Notre Dame Classics Department covers both Classics and Middle Eastern Studies, but the Bibliographer serves only the Classics portion of the department. The Bibliographer provides coverage of Byzantine Studies as well, but there is no such department at Notre Dame, and no Byzantinist faculty members on campus, though some will be added over the next few years; therefore there is currently no Byzantine faculty or students for the collection to serve, although some of the Classics faculty do research in this area (L. Jordan, personal communication, April 20, 2010).

i. Demographic Information. The Classics Department comprises 12 faculty members, as well as one emeritus professor, two faculty members housed in the departments of Theology and Art History (with concurrent appointments in Classics), and one faculty member with a joint appointment in History and Classics (Faculty//Department of Classics//University of Notre Dame, 2006). A search will soon be conducted for a senior Hellenist (M. Bloomer, personal communication, April 20, 2010).

Currently the department has approximately 25 undergraduate majors. A number of students are also minoring in Classics. There is also a Summer Language Program, whose students may be called upon to use the library; these students are either students at other colleges and universities or perhaps advanced high school students. It has no graduate students of its own but offers graduate courses for students earning MAs in Early Christian Studies or PhDs in the PhD in Literature program. Beginning in 2011, 4-5 students will be entering the MA program each year, so the graduate student population should approximate 8-10 students each year.

The department also serves via its curriculum a number of students who are not Classics majors and minors but who enroll in the 22-32 Classics courses offered on average each semester. These students may also require library resources to complete assignments for their courses. More specific enrolment figures are available from the Classics department and the University Registrar each term upon request, and the Bibliographer should maintain these statistics in order to moderate better requests for books intended for pedagogical use.

This is the intended service community for this collection and an appropriate one, given the fact that the collection is Classics-centered.

C. Parameters for the Collection. Most resources for Classics still exist in the print realm. Our policy is to collect monographs, journals, and electronic resources on CD-ROM, such as CD-ROMs indexing Classical bibliography, ancient Greek and Latin literary texts, papyri, and inscriptions. Many print journals are also available on databases such as JSTOR. A small library of Classics-related films on DVD (e.g., “Gladiator” or “Troy”) for use in classes will also be acquired. Hesburgh Library does not collect video materials extensively in general (Appendix B, 35), and without a course on Classics in Film or a similar topic there is little need for the Classics collection to devote significant resources to audiovisual materials. Special Collections at Hesburgh Library does occasionally collect realia from the world of Classics such as papyri or coins (L. Jordan, personal communication, April 20, 2010), but the general Classics collection will not replicate this practice given the fragility of such objects and their limited need in the Classics curriculum or faculty research.

In accordance with RLG Conspectus Level 3 (see above), I recommend that we collect materials intended for use for instructional support of undergraduate and graduate students: basic works and representative journals are collected, with a good range of primary and secondary literature, and reference and bibliographic tools. These parameters are more than an appropriate for an undergraduate program and should suit the needs of the MA program quite well. Until a PhD program is established, there is no need to collect at Level 4, Research, and we are not a specialized enough collection to collect at Level 5, Comprehensive.

Materials acquired should cover the broad sweep of Classical and Byzantine Studies, from the beginning of the Bronze Age in Greece (ca. 1600 BC) through the fall of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire (AD 1453). Within that range of dates, the greatest need for materials falls on those dealing with Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Greece (750-146 BC) and Republican and Imperial Rome (508 BC-AD 476). This range of dates is still broad, and to narrow it down further, materials directly relevant to faculty research and the Classics curriculum will be given priority. Other selectors, such as the Medieval Institute or the Theology Bibliographer, will occasionally purchase Classics materials that relate more directly to the areas of expertise of those collections (see below). Beyond that, we seek to maintain and add to the quality of our collection in Greek and Latin literature, Greek history, epigraphy, and archaeology. Some of this will involve retrospective buying (see below).

D. Patron Needs. The collection will support the research of the faculty in Classics, which ranges from Classical Athens through Early Christianity (Faculty//Department of Classics//University of Notre Dame), and the Classics curriculum, which covers dates ranging from Bronze Age Greece through Early Christianity (Course Descriptions//Department of Classics//University of Notre Dame), and which serves both graduate and undergraduate students. The collection is therefore geared towards educational and informational needs.

This is by and large a circulating collection, although some key reference materials do not circulate because of their essential nature to the field (e.g., the Oxford Classical Dictionary) or their unwieldy and fragile nature (such as large folio volumes in the fields of epigraphy, papyrology, and numismatics). The Byzantine Reference Room Collection, which includes material from Homer (ca. 750 BC) through the fall of Constantinople (AD 1453), is non-circulating, but many of its materials are duplicated in the library stacks and thus circulate (L. Jordan, personal communication, April 20, 2010). I recommend that the current circulation policy be continued; it is standard in most academic libraries, and the wealth of duplicate copies provided by the acquisition of the Anastos Collection in 2000 (Jenkins, 2000) allows Notre Dame to maintain easily and with little cost a policy of having both a circulating and a non-circulating copy of select, important, and heavily-used texts.

Part of the evaluation policy for this collection is soliciting comments regular ly from focus groups of Classics faculty and students (see below). These focus groups, as well as communication from individual faculty and students, will help identify changing patron needs.

II. Details of the Subject Areas and Formats Collected

A. Users. The users of this collection will be the Classics faculty, faculty affiliated with Classics, Classics majors and minors, students in Classics courses, students taking graduate courses in the Classics department from the MA in Early Christian Studies and PhD in Literature programs, other Notre Dame students, faculty, and staff, and the future Classics graduate students and Byzantinist faculty members. Table 1 illustrates the division of these users into primary, secondary, irregular, and future users of the collection:

Table 1: Users of the Classical and Byzantine Studies Collection by Type

Type of User / Primary / Secondary / Irregular / Future
Classics Faculty / research; teaching preparation
Affiliated Classics faculty / research; teaching preparation
Classics majors / classwork and assignments; honors theses
Classics minors / classwork and assignments
Classics students / classwork and assignments when enrolled in an appropriate course
Graduate students (not enrolled in Classics) / classwork and assignments when enrolled in an appropriate course; thesis and dissertation research
Other Notre Dame students, faculty, and staff / Only when needed for research, classwork, teaching, or as user interest dictates
Byzantinist faculty / research; teaching preparation (primary user)
Classics MA students / classwork and assignments; teaching preparation for TAs; thesis research (primary user)

A primary user is defined as the main user of the collection, often on a daily basis; a secondary user is one who uses the collection less than the primary user but still fairly regularly, i.e., at least several times a semester and perhaps more often. An irregular user is one whose academic circumstances – coursework or research that occasionally requires Classical references – lead to little regular contact with the collection but who may use the collection intensively over a short period of time due to academic commitments. Future users are anticipated new members of the Notre Dame community in the near future. By collecting circulation statistics for books in certain Classics-related LC call numbers (PA, DF, CN, etc.) for both checked-out books and those used in-house, the library can get a better idea of how many users of each type there are and what books are being used (Dinkins, 2003;Wagner, 2007). The bibliographer should also remain aware of changes in the Classics faculty, Classics student population, and the number of enrollments in Classics courses.

Just as input is important in school library collections (Sanacore, 2006), so too for a developing collection such as the Notre Dame Classics collection it is necessary to involve users of all types in the development of the collection. Community analysis is also key (Evans & Saponaro, 2005, ch. 2; Lecture 2, 3, April 5, 2010).

B. Formats. The following formats will be selected for this collection:

• Print: Monographs relevant to faculty research and pedgagogical activities; monographs published by the major academic presses in the field of Classics (e.g., Oxford University Press, Routledge); monographic series published by journals (e.g., Historia Einzelschriften); runs of the more common and heavily-used journals in Classics (e.g., Classical Quarterly, the American Journal of Philology); major reference works in the field (Neue Pauly, L’Annee Philologique).
• Electronic: An increasing number of serials in Classics are available via databases such as JSTOR. Recent research indicates that print journals are still heavily used, although large packages of electronic and print journals are becoming increasingly popular and useful (Botero, Carrico, and Tennant); accordingly, Notre Dame should continue print subscriptions to the more heavily used journals in the field of Classics. Searchable CD-ROMs used in research in Classics (e.g., the Database of Classical Bibliography, the electronic index of L’Annee Philologique; EPIGRAPH, a searchable CD-ROM of Latin inscriptions from Rome) will be collected; while there are few formal electronic resources like subscription databases in Classics, there are a plethora of websites that are useful (TOCS-IN, Table of Contents of Interest to Classicists; the PHI online site for searching Greek inscriptions; Perseus Digital Library) and these will be indexed on the Classics Resources page (Language and Literature, Classics//Hesburgh Libraries//University of Notre Dame). Electronic resources, of course, come with a number of caveats about how they are to be used (Harris), and users should be educated about these caveats by library instruction classes or by, e.g., pop-up screens on a computer that are activated when a resource is accessed or the library home page is left in order to access a resource. It is especially important, given that many of the primary users of the collection are of college age and belong to the “Millenial” or “Next-Gen” generation (Abrams & Luther, 2004; Evans & Saponaro, 2005, ch.1), to develop electronic resources as much as possible, despite the traditional print nature of the discipline of Classic.
• Audiovisual materials, such as films that relate to the field of Classics (Gladiator, Troy) or audiotapes of performances of spoken Greek and Latin (e.g., the work of Stanley Lombardo) may be acquired for use in the classroom.

C. Selectors. The Classics and Byzantine Studies Bibliographer is the primary selector for this collection and will be qualified with degrees in both library science and Classics. Selection will be made from approval lists and retrospective buying decisions will be made by the selector. Important to this process is faculty input, so that we follow a combination of the centralized selector, client-centered, and collaborative approaches (Lecture 2, 3, April 5, 2010). Because the Classics selector has an annual budget of only $28000 ($20000 Classics, $8000 Byzantine Studies: L. Jordan, personal communication, April 19, 2010), other selectors will often purchase materials relevant to Classics if it falls within their scope: for instance, the Medieval Institute will purchase books on Late Antiquity and the Theology selector will purchase books on early Christianity or Judaism in the Greco-Roman world (A. Krieger, personal communication, April 19, 2010). There is a Byzantine Studies Committee at Hesburgh Library and it will be reconstituted once the position of Bibliographer is filled (Byzantine Studies Collection//Hesburgh Libraries//University of Notre Dame, 2008).

D. Selection Criteria. The selection criteria will be as follows (Evans & Saponaro, 2005, 74-75; Wood & Hoffman, 2002, 89-90)

• Cost. Books over $125 cannot be selected from approval lists (Appendix A, 24), and the Head of Collection Development must approve purchases over $500 (Appendix B, 29). A cost-benefit analysis should be undertaken for any book or serial with a high price in light of the user community and patron needs in the Notre Dame Classics collection (Getahun & Keillor, 2005).
• Accessibility. Is the potential acquisition too esoteric or too juvenile for patron needs?
• Duplication. Is the material already owned? Will adding another copy be of value to the patron community (e.g., if it is a key text in a popular course)? Similarly, does a text now missing or stolen require replacement because of popularity or relevance?
• Language. In what language is the potential acquisition written? English is the main language of the patron community, along with Latin and ancient Greek; books in French, German, and Italian have a much more limited range but are important to maintaining faculty and graduate-level research programmes.
• Interdisciplinary reach. Will the potential acquisition appeal to those outside of the Notre Dame Classics community?
• Retrospective buying. There are significant gaps in the collection in the areas mentioned. Is a previously published book useful and relevant to the community either for pedagogical or research purposes? One concern is that so many gaps in the collection need filling that it may not be possible to do so entirely, at least immediately; I recommend providing links to free texts online (Google Books, Net Library, Project Gutenberg, etc.) in library catalog records as a kind of placeholder. The amount of free material on the internet has yet to be exploited significantly (Albanese, 2009), including by libraries, and such a use seems to be a fitting one under the circumstances. Scholarly monographs have not yet reached the stage of initial publication taking place on the web for the most part, but trends in the field should be tracked by the selector (Lecture 4, 3, April 19, 2010).

For selecting electronic resources, the criteria are very similar with the addition of the question of how much support the vendor will provide (Criteria for Selecting Electronic Resources, 2001; Evans & Saponaro, 2005, 163-173).