Read an interesting article in this month's Gazette about a collection management tool called CollectionHQ, (previously Smartism) which is used in 30% of UK public libraries. it is claimed that this "Evidence Based Stock Management system" can save up to three person years in resources. It has long struck me that stock selection in libraries could be a lot more rational (see my earlier post on this subject) . Most systems provide similar facilities anyway through the use of customisable statistical categories for books and users and the use of customisable reports. These have been underused in the past: now it looks as if public libraries are investing thousands in paying a private company to do the maths for them. Librarians ought to use statistics to help them select stock (and understand how to do this), but surely the final decisions on what stock to order and circulate have to be made by humans, and surely this should be one of the librarians' key skills and hence not be outsourced. I would be very interested to learn more about how CollectionHQ works. I suspect in our university library, if we wanted a program to do this sort of thing we would just ask our systems boffins to write one themselves.
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