Managing Business Collections in Libraries

Business information is in strong demand by a wide range of library patrons. Academic librarians must meet the needs of undergraduates, graduates, and faculty who require information about businesses for their coursework and research; school librarians must deal with sophisticated financial questions from students in a variety of classes; public librarians must provide investors and job seekers with information about financial trends, prospective employers, and particular industries; and special librarians must provide their users with immediate and current data about clients, competitors, and markets. Business information is available in various forms, such as print sources, CD-ROMs, and on-line databases, and is particularly volatile, with the news of the morning often being more in demand than the news of the week before.

The wide range of patron needs, product types, and constantly changing data makes managing business collections a particularly complex and demanding responsibility. This management guide provides a wealth of information to assist librarians who are new to managing business collections. Chapters written by expert contributors survey such topics as planning, financial and personnel concerns, and facilities management; the selection, acquisition, cataloging, classification, processing, and preservation of print and electronic material; and the provision of access, reference, and information services to both internal and external user communities. A selected annotated bibliography concludes the volume.

Author Biography

CAROLYN A. SHEEHY is Clare and Lucy Oesterle Director of Library Services at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. Formerly, she was Head of the Reference Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Administrative Curator of Special Collections at The Newberry Library. She is the editor of Managing Performing Arts Collections in Academic and Public Libraries (Greenwood, 1994) and the author of Reference and Information Service in Academic Libraries in Urban and Metropolitan Areas: A Management Handbook, edited by Gerard B. McCabe (Greenwood, 1992). She is the current president of the Illinois Association of College and Research Libraries and a former president of LIBRAS, a consortium of eighteen private Chicago-area academic libraries.