Whether or not you've ever wanted to work in a public library, you have to admit that it's pretty cool to be the one who gets to spend a fair amount of taxpayers' dollars each month on books, DVDs and CDs. While the ordering decisions I make for some popular items are done on autopilot ( books by James Patterson, Daniel Steel, any movie with Jennifer Aniston), the trickier aspect of library collection development involves selecting a body of materials that will closely reflect the needs and interests or the people who live in the community where I am employed.
Unfortunately, because space in public libraries is finite, the flip side of collection development is a task librarians refer to as "weeding," the removal from the collection of those materials that have either become outdated or that are no longer being checked out. Because of automated library circulation systems, it is relatively easy to get what librarians refer to as "dusty book" printouts, listings of those items that have not been checked out within a specified amount of time. It is a also a sad fact of library life that those dusty book printouts will usually include some titles by the likes of William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville and other literary giants. At least in the library where I work ( and no matter how dusty) the literary classics will never be weeded; being the optimist that I am, I know that sooner or later someone will be in to check out The Tempest, The Sun Also Rises, and Moby Dick and I want to spare myself the embarrassment of being the director of a library that doesn't have them.
So what then exactly is the series conundrum?
Although there are quite a few authors outside the mystery genre who have recurring characters (Kinsella/Shopaholic, Roth/Zuckerman, Harris/Sookie Stackhouse - you get the idea), authors of successful mystery series command a disproportionately large amount of shelf space in my library. I love it when a patron of mine gets hooked on a series because it means that she will be coming to the library at frequent intervals and will know exactly what she's looking for. Howeve, to keep these patrons happy, it also means that the library must keep on hand the entire run of Stephanie Plums (the numbers as well as the in-betweens), not to mention all the letters of Sue Grafton's alphabet, all of Robert Parker's Spenser novels, etc., etc., etc. Going under the assumption that most other people are as compulsive as I am, I fully understand that they do not want to read volumes in a series out of order or (gasp) skip some of them completely. I also completely understand why an author who has created an extremely popular set of characters would want to run with them for as long and as far as he or she is able.
Perhaps I am putting myself at great personal risk by coming out on this issue on this particular website, but when I purchase books for my library's collection, the decision regarding whether or not to select a title in a mystery series is much more fraught with peril than is the decision to purchase a stand alone title. What if only one or two of my patrons are interested in reading a particular series? Aren't they as entitled to find in the library the books they want to read as the people who enjoy Evanovich and Grafton? The answer, of course, is that they are. However, with so many mystery series out there to begin with and so many of these series extending their runs into the double digits, is it appropriate for me to allocate a disproportionately large amount of shelf space to volumes that just aren't going to get checked out all that often? What if I first become aware of a mystery writer when volume 6 of his or her series gets a starred review in Publisher's Weekly? Don't I then have to go back and buy volumes 1-5 or do I hope that I can procure the back volumes for my patron through interlibrary loan? What if a patron borrowed volume 1 from a friend and is now requesting that we purchase volume 2 for our collection? Do I not go ahead and also purchase volume 1 for the sake of future readers of that series? What about large print? What about audio? I could just go on and on, but you probably don't want me to.
(And you thought librarians didn't have stressful jobs.)
The answer, of course, is to have bigger libraries.
