This week's guest speaker

Last Tuesday we had a guest speaker (Karen Lowe) who spoke to the class about collection development. She mainly talked about how to develop a five-year plan to update the materials on your shelf. I learned a great deal from her and it seems like the only logical plan for librarians on a tight budget. However, I did feel somewhat lost as she discussed the categories of the Dewey Decimal System. I don't know how I'll ever learn all those categories. Also, how can you judge what category a book will belong to without reading it (just by looking at its cover)? I guess that's where the annotations and reviews come in when you are reordering. The process for weeding and replacing materials that she mentioned really didn't seem too tough. Parts of it did seem somewhat tedious, but not so overwhelming anymore. I really feel like I learned a lot about how a library is run!