Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Materials-Centred Approach To Public Library Collection Development: A Defense., Matthew Kelly

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

How selection of materials, understood as subject knowledge, should occur for non-fiction collections in public libraries has been polarized along an axis of user demand and intellectual rigor for many decades. Attempts to synthesize these various approaches have, largely, failed to do justice to either tendency. This paper is formulated as an encomium to the materials-centered approach and looks to uncover what is lost when librarians choose to focus in extremis, on the role of the user in the building of subject knowledge for a comprehensive civil society-oriented collection.