Brandy Danner is a librarian specializing in young adult services.
Lengthy collection development update
We’ve officially hit 100 titles in our Graphic Novel collection. There’s a lot of manga in there—Fruits Basket, GTO, BananaFish, CLAMP School Detectives—that I didn’t pick out, but was ordered for us. With multiple copies of each, you can usually find one of them on the shelf.
The Western comics, with only one copy of each, generally rotate pretty well. Some titles (like Orbiter) still sit on the shelf, no matter how often I move it around to more prominent places on the face-out display. Since it keeps moving, though, I’m assuming it sees a fair amount of in-house use, so I’m not complaining. Much.
However, in addition to our usual collection budget, the Friends group is giving us $1,000 to spend on teen books. This is a lot more money than it sounds like. I’m ordering a bunch of things teens are requesting, even though it’s a lot of junk—Gossip Girls, The A-List, and similar titles, in addition to several “gangsta”-type books (mostly from Triple Crown Publications) and the novels based on “That’s So Raven.” I’m also getting a bunch of graphic novels—more Owly, more Amelia Rules!, more Batman, some X-Men, the second Flight anthology, True Story Swear to God, a couple of Ariel Schrag books, Mother Come Home… and some others I can’t think of offhand. I still have $250 left to spend, though I’m hoping I can get the Friends group to advance me some of the money so that I can buy a lot of this at SPX next month.
Because I’m upstairs in the Children’s Room 98% of the time, I don’t get as many requests for teen books as the Reference staff downstairs gets, but they feed me the information when I’m looking to do orders. Most recently they mentioned the That’s So Raven books, anything gangsta (I don't really know what this means, so I just picked some titles at random from Triple Crown—the recommended publisher), and erotica.
I’m no prude. I fully support the idea of having erotica in the library. But. We have a pretty wide age range that browses the YA collection—some adults, some 15–18-year-olds, mostly 12-15, and some 10-12. Knowing how many middle school (and late elementary school!) readers the collection has, I’m not comfortable putting explicit material in the collection. My solution was just to throw it back on reference and tell them I’m fine having it in the adult collection, so if they want to buy it and circulate it to teens, that’s fine—I just don’t want it in a collection that I know goes out to fifth-graders. And now I sound like some kind of knee-jerk censor, restricting a collection based on the fact that kids who are NOT the target audience can still find it, but… I’m just not comfortable with it. I mean, I know the graphic novel collection goes out to adults all the time, but I’m still not putting True Porn in there. (If we manage to break off into separate Adult and YA GN collection, then I’ll buy it.)
On a semi-related note, since the GN collection has grown so significantly (as in, become an actual collection, instead of six books mixed in with the paperbacks), we’ve had an increase in the number of patrons in the children’s room asking if we have comics here. So far, we’ve been directing them back downstairs, with some recommendations if they’re looking for something for the kids (Owly, Amelia Rules!, Ultimate Spider-Man, or others, depending on the age of the kid). It’s got us thinking, though. We have a little bit of extra shelf space up here, so why not create a separate kids’ GN section? Once my coworker/supervisor is back from vacation, I’m going to find out if I can start building this collection from scratch, and see where it gets us. We have some Tintin and Asterix books already, and I’ll buy duplicate copies of some of the all-ages material that’s downstairs. I’m fantasizing a bit, but the children’s department has $2,000 of the Friends’ money to spend, so I don’t think it’s that distant a dream.
My library is starting a monthly GN discussion group (see TSL / A for more details) in September, and while we don’t have flyers yet, the word is already getting out. A couple of patrons have already marked it on their calendars, and told me how much they’re enjoying the collection. A third patron told me that she’d been browsing the YA collection this summer, and was so impressed at the new books that were coming in, and then noticed the graphic novels. “I’d never read comics before, but the rest of the YA collection was so great that I picked up a couple, and now I’m hooked. There are so many different genres and styles! Are you getting more?”
After the disastrous Teen Summer Reading Program, it’s nice to know that I still rock at something, even if it is a quiet, behind-the-scenes type thing like collection development.
