Philosophical Crisis, Part 4: The Quest for a Solution

And now, what is (hopefully) the solution.

Before we get started on this next semester, I am (hopefully) going to add at least a few helpful resources to some vocational topics that I know will appear next semester.

I started exploring Amazon.

Sure enough, the second I did, I found books on all of the needed vocational topics: HVAC installation/maintenance, car stereo systems, etc. Welding, interestingly, is a popular topic, as the local community college (and by local, I mean literally across the street) offers a great welding course of study -- I even found books on welding for everything from engineering to art.

Of course, I'll have to adhere to our CDP -- finding reviews to ensure that these materials are quality, etc., before I buy them. But I am more than a little depressed that of all our resources, the only ones we could find were from outside sources.

Another possibility to consider? Re-subscribing to periodicals. When I started working here, the previous librarian had cancelled all magazine subscriptions, citing that no one used them. That's probably true. However, how great would it have been if we had an archive of the past year's issues of Golf Magazine for my golf researcher, or of Car and Driver for my auto-mechanic researchers? That would have been fantastic.

Here is what I learned from the entirety of the Philosophical Crisis:
1. I profoundly dislike how my library neglects/ignores vocational topics, and would like to change it, post-haste. The way to do that is to find out what we need and find a way to fill that need.
2. It's a darn good thing I had the kids study web evaluation, because we relied solely on outside-of-the-library web sources for several of these topics.
3. We shouldn't HAVE to rely solely on the internet for sources; if a librarian knows his/her patrons and community, the collection should reflect their needs.

That's the bottom line, right there: if I know my community, my patrons, and my school, my library's collection should reflect their needs.

I'm on it.