Book Review: Rightsizing the Academic Library Collection

Abstract

The author, the current head of collection management at Purdue University Libraries (West Lafayette, Indiana) and a long-time proponent of meeting user information needs with innovative collection development practices as reflected by her extensive record of scholarship, has written a provocative work that can serve as both a wake-up call and catalyst to action for academic librarians who manage collections. Ward introduces readers to the concept of “rightsizing,” a term adapted from the corporate world that can be used to encapsulate activities done to increase a library’s overall floor space by reducing space devoted to storing physical collections. Effectively organized into five chapters, Rightsizing the Academic Library Collection provides a brief historical account of the state of affairs for academic library collections today, argues for the uncluttering and routine culling of physical collections based on current user needs, shows how to use a variety of data to make informed decisions, gives examples of actual rightsizing projects that can be duplicated, shows best practice workflows, and gives a glimpse into workable solutions that can be applied to make a library more relevant to its users. And, according to Ward, it is the user’s needs (scholarly or otherwise) and positive library experiences that should provide the impetus for librarians to “rightsize” (as opposed to supersize or wrongsize) their resource collections (viii).