Longer term users of the Heythrop library may have come across our acquisition policy at some point during their time here. A dry-sounding name disguising a potentially interesting offering! Let me explain how this might affect you:
A large number of our new acquisitions are books recommended by our panel of experts, with a broad range of specialisms encompassing Biblical Studies and Church History, to Philosophy of religion, Jesuit education, and much more. But we also know and appreciate that our community of library users come with a wealth of knowledge of their own – and might know of an interesting publication that we don’t!
Since moving to our new library system Koha, any library member now can suggest through our system new books for the library to purchase, and share their own breadth of knowledge and insight to the library. This can be done by logging in to your account on the new library catalogue and navigating to your account summary:
You can find purchase suggestions towards the bottom of the menu options on the left of the screen here:
The next page will show you all of your purchase suggestions so far, along with information about their status (accepted, ordered, available, rejected, etc.) You can click on ‘+ new purchase suggestion’ to start entering details of the book you would like us to buy.
If you have several books you’d like to suggest in one go, or if you prefer not to use a form, please just contact us by email, giving us at least the title and author/editor as information (if it is quicker you can use a link to a publisher’s web page for the book or a bookseller’s page).
It is always worth checking our holdings using the library catalogue before making a suggestion; just this last week we have had suggestions from library users for books that were already on our shelves at the Mount Street reading room. Though of course it is always reassuring to know that what we are collecting is indeed useful to our users!
Besides already being held in the library, another common reason for us not to go ahead with a suggested book could be that it doesn’t quite fall within the scope of the collection as it exists now – space is at a premium in our small reading room after all. But the balancing act between keeping ‘on brand’ with the collection and thinking outside the box to discover fruitful new avenues of theological and philosophical research, is a challenge that we enjoy as staff here at the library.
SV
What are your thoughts about the above?