Just how un-ideal CD usually is in an academic setting--such as when the director wants the faculty making the decisions but faculty are too busy to prioritize telling us what to order (and the repercussions this can have on the acquisitions and cataloging departments). Also, realistic discussion of how to handle budget shortfalls for electronic resources (cost per use, does it support the curricula, etc.). - Kirsten

Excellent, thank you. What else? - D0r0th34

that you're likely to be building collections that support academic areas out of your area of expertise. - Marie is merry.

that there is usually going to be only one or two faculty in a department interested in talking with you, and how do you go about building a collection that supports the whole department anyway. - Marie is merry.

how *do* you go about that? :) - D0r0th34

okay, one more thing i wish i'd learned: as the formats for scholarly content change - the latest evolution being from print to electronic - a collection developer needs to be in touch with how people use the materials collected. if a coll developer is going to prefer e-content, he/she then becomes the responsible party for ensuring that those using the materials know how to access the content. this demonstrates that collection development is more complicated than simply selecting materials. - Marie is merry.

From the PL perspective: where to find the short popular series before the kids start asking for them; "do I put it in children's or teen"; series development (when to give up, when to replace); where to buy; standing orders: good or bad --I recall learning a lot about weeding, not so much purchasing.... As it is now I read a boatload of children's lit, still trying to catch up and I know there are holes in the chapter book collection because all the money went to Harry Potter books for at least two years. - Abigail

from the academic perspective - how to shift an organization and its staff roles from buying stuff to enabling the creation and free use of stuff. (Do I get a star? Seriously, I'm thinking about this a lot...) - barbara fister

You definitely get a star. I think I was tapped to teach this CD course because that precise scenario is kinda the sum total of my professional life. - D0r0th34

oh oh! I really wish we would stop dividing the world into what we subscribe to and what we don't. We do ourselves a disservice when we don't promote great websites and data resources (or gosh, even open access archives!) along side all the stuff we pay money for. Students and faculty don't see the world like this, and nor should we. Damn I typed all that before I saw Barbara's response. Glad others thinking of this too. - Fiona Bradley

thank you, Fiona :) - D0r0th34

What Fiona, Barbara, and Marie said about the formats changing and enabling access, managing subscriptions rather than just buying things. I learned *nothing* about license negotiation, troubleshooting subscription access, promoting/providing access to e-content. - Galadriel C.

This is from a PL perspective as well, but I learned much of what I needed to know in library school. Economics in Collections taught by a non-librarian, a mathematician. Look at the stats, predict the action, order the right material. - Jeff Scott

D0r0th34, I did that by never stopping trying to get the faculty to discuss their needs with me, collecting syllabi (from the dept secretary when necessary), trolling the course lists for departments, building booklists based on those assumptions and sending them to faculty for feedback, and then when they didn't respond sending the faculty the list fo titles I bought for their area (the latter almost always provoked a response if nothing else did). I don;t do this anymore, but am happy to discuss my strategies if you want. - RudĩϐЯaЯïan