Letting the readers have a say: Crowd theory in collection development

摘要

One of the pressing concerns for academic and research librarians is collection development, or choosing and purchasing new books for the library. Librarians spend countless hours scanning through system-recommended book titles, trying to determine which ones the students will use and benefit from as academic resources. Do students look at book covers more than at content, for instance? Do they choose books based on five-star Amazon reviews? Do they prefer books with interesting titles or interesting descriptions? Every year we do our best to decide what will be most useful for students and their research needs.