Collecting to the Core

cludes faster growing occupations; earning potential of careers that don’t require a four-year degree; currently available certificate programs; reasons teens are choosing vocational programs; and types of vocational programs available in the United States.

Through their experiences planning programming in their own public libraries, the authors provide a plethora of programming ideas and resources for library staff to use. Programs they created and executed include a “Meet a Professional” Workshop Series; Internships at the Library; a Trade School Fair; and “Teaching to a Career” in the Library. Additionally, the authors write about the importance of partnering with other organizations and schools in their communities to offer programming together.

Wyckoff and Harris identify what draws teens into their programming, what doesn’t, and what helps their teen patrons return. Food, giveaways, competitions, hands-on activities and offering group presentations are at the top of their list for successful programming. They not only elicit teen feedback to aid in planning their programs, it was also exciting to read that they encourage their teen patrons to create, market, and facilitate career workshops at their own community library. Even if you have not engaged your community as such, it is useful to see how librarians serving two different communities have done so.

The last two chapters are dedicated to the importance of ongoing evaluation of library programming as well as collection development tools to aid library staff in the creation of that programming. The authors include specific ways of measuring the impact the programs have on their communities. They offer concrete ways of collecting community feedback and survey data. The collection development chapter lists specific book titles that aid both library staff in providing teen services and program planning but also titles meant for teens who need guidance and advice in pursuing a path after high school. All of the books listed as resources have been written within the last ten years, most within the last five years.

Wyckoff and Harris identified a need among their teen patrons and their parents for vocational career planning assistance at the public library. In particular, they became aware of their teen patrons who were not interested in attending a traditional 4-year college after high school. They recognized that high school counselors cannot possibly keep up with helping an entire school population of students and their varied needs when it comes to career and education planning. The public library can fill this gap by providing relevant programming to their teen users. By sharing the successful and not-so-successful programming executed by the authors over the years at their public libraries, they have highlighted the fact that public library staff can play a key role in helping teens figure out what they want to do after high school.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this available somewhere in my shared net-

work. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get it within three to five days via my network catalog.)

Collecting to the Core — A Case Study in Creating a New Linguistics List

by Adam Siegel (Researcher Services Librarian, University of California, Davis; Linguistics Subject Editor, Resources for College Libraries) <apsiegel@ucdavis.edu>

Column Editor: Anne Doherty (Resources for College Libraries Project Editor, CHOICE/ACRL) <adoherty@ala-choice.org>

Column Editor’s Note: The “Collecting to the Core” column highlights monographic works that are essential to the academic library within a particular discipline, inspired by the Resources for College Libraries bibliography (online at http://www.rclweb.net). In each essay, subject specialists introduce and explain the classic titles and topics that continue to remain relevant to the undergraduate curriculum and library collection. Disciplinary trends may shift, but some classics never go out of style. — AD

Creating a new subject bibliography for Resources for College Libraries (RCL) is both an honor and an opportunity to assess (or reassess) one’s field, and one’s relationship to it. Title lists, because they are created with a specific audience in mind, are selective by nature, and hence evaluative. How to select the scholarly works that both serve the needs of contemporary libraries (and their users) and provide a bibliographic history of a discipline in six hundred titles (or less) is a challenge.

The first task I faced when developing a new title list in Linguistics for RCL was how to review the existing subject literature. I elected to analyze the linguistics holdings of a sizable sample of American and Canadian college libraries to determine by consensus, as core works should (in the main) be represented in the holdings of most college libraries. My initial searches included Library of Congress call number ranges and subject headings, including LC call number ranges P-PN, E, and G and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) such as “Linguistics,” “Phonetics,” “Semantics,” Grammars,” etc. During this first pass, I exported the bibliographic records and populated a spreadsheet. Once I had de-duplicated (noting which titles were most widely held), around 4,000 titles remained. Because I had exported relatively complete MARC records, I was able to sort and filter by format (for instance, journals, sorted by ISSN, were moved to a separate sheet since RCL focuses primarily on monographs).

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At this point I began to review the title list somewhat impressionistically for retentions and removals, checking authors and titles against an internal understanding of the curriculum in the discipline. Many of the initial “discards” were titles that were arguably too marginal, specialized, or niche for the putative college library. Justifications for marginality included language (for an undergraduate library collection, English-language materials were a priority), publisher (a number of linguistics publishers’ annual output exceeds the scope of an RCL list), or publication type (conference proceedings were often struck for this reason). Throughout the initial review and deselection process, I aimed to be broadly inclusive of the field as a whole, remaining conscious of my own training as a linguist and the potential biases of my educational experience, which is to say I strove to be as respectful and inclusive of the various strains, movements, schools, and tendencies in the modern language sciences as possible. This meant acknowledging not only the centrality of the Chomskyan turn in theoretical linguistics to the subsequent growth of the field, but also ensuring that other theoretical approaches (particularly functionalist approaches such as Halliday) were included so as to properly represent the breadth of the field.1 I felt confident making broad-based decisions as to representative authors and titles: seminal titles are easy to spot, given one’s own disciplinary reading and checked against citation indexes. When in doubt, I used both quantitative and qualitative measurements: I consulted title holding counts (is this title currently widely held?) and standard reference works (e.g., Strazny’s Encyclopedia of Linguistics).2

Now I was reviewing two different sheets: a core list of around 250 titles identified as absolutely essential to any college library collection, including works that broadly covered all aspects of linguistics and the science of language, and a secondary comprehensive list with the 500 or so titles remaining after my initial review and removals. Next came the development of a unique subject taxonomy, informed by and representative of the undergraduate curriculum. While this task seemed daunting initially, prior experience devising taxonomies and extensive experience working with linguistics taxonomies, both LCSH and Linguistics

and Language Behavior Abstracts

(LLBA), informed my efforts. The broad major subjects — phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics — along with applied topics like psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, educational linguistics, language acquisition, etc., were easy to identify and relatively easy to incorporate into the overall RCL taxonomic subject scheme. With a draft taxonomy developed, the challenge was assigning subject headings to all titles — both the core titles and the broader title list. At this stage, selection and analysis consisted of an iterative sorting by subject, author, publisher, publication year, edition, print status, etc. This classification stage also provided an opportunity to consolidate both lists, resulting in a draft title list of around 500 monographs.

After multiple rounds of adding, deleting, assessing, and classifying, it was time to send the draft subject bibliography — title list, scope note, and subject taxonomy — out for peer review. When the comments came back, I was gratified to learn that I had largely succeeded in my bibliographic endeavor: the reviewers in the main approved the title selections, and in several instances recommended new titles, older works, key web resources, and revised editions for further consideration. They also suggested lacunae in the subject scope that I addressed by a focused review of the relevant areas. This led to the inclusion of a number of additional titles, which also suggested revisions to the taxonomy, particularly as imbalances emerged (e.g., some subject headings contained a single title, while some contained thirty or more); I was able to consolidate some headings and expand others. I also reviewed publication dates and print availability, in some cases affirmatively retaining out-of-print titles based on their continued importance. As it stands, less than 10% of the titles in the current subject bibliography are out-of-print.

The final title list — published in July 2020 — represents an extraordinarily small-c catholic collection of significant works in the language sciences from the 19th century to the present. It covers philology, historical linguistics, paralinguistic fields (folklore, poetics, semiotics), typological surveys and grammatical descriptions of the world’s languages, important theoretical approaches to language, works at the intersection of other disciplines (cognitive and computer sciences, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, education, etc.), standard reference works, and, most saliently for college libraries, an excellent selection of introductory works (e.g.,

Leonard Bloom-

field’s Language) and a number of respected textbooks. 3-4 The scholarly impact of structuralism throughout the twentieth century is acknowledged by the presence of Saussure and his intellectual successors.5-6 The centrality of the generative approach to language in North American linguistics necessitated the inclusion of classic works in syntax (NoamChomsky’s Syntactic Structures), phonology (Chomsky and Halle’s The Sound Pattern of English), and philosophy of language; the centrality of analytic philosophy to both the generative tradition and pragmatics likewise necessitated the inclusion of many classics works in speech act theory, such as Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. 7-9

Throughout the development of the core bibliography, my iterative method was guided by the principles of exhaustion and balance: I reviewed as much as I could, and as many titles as I could, then culled and refined with an eye toward equipoise and consistency, until I had reached a collection size of roughly 600 titles. And the best thing about this title list is that, like all RCL lists, it is subject to ongoing review and refinement. Creating a new subject list in linguistics was an incredibly valuable exercise for me, as it challenged me to be aware of (and hence able to recreate) a thorough, nuanced, and disinterested approach to selection. In turn, I feel the title list will be incredibly valuable as well to selectors and patrons across a wide range of libraries.

This is the final column in the “Collecting to the Core” series. Appearing in ATG since 2011, RCL subject editors have contributed 59 bibliographic essays, covering essential works on diverse topics from American crime fiction to youth sports. Thank you for reading. — AD