Software Increases Book Budgets

A few years ago, Jim Hundemer, manager of library services for the Houston school district, despaired at the state of many of the library collections he managed. He wanted to convince his superintendent, Rod Paige, that those collections were old and lacking in many areas, and to do so, he needed some hard data.

Hundemer's Follett representative suggested having Follett Library Services analyze the libraries' collections; Hundemer downloaded his schools' MARC records to data disks and sent them to Follett. Although Houston's libraries used many different automation systems and the data they generated were inconsistent, the Follett workers managed to clean up the data and get it back to Hundemer, who turned it into a report, which he presented to the superintendent along with a request for funding. The data demonstrated, among other things, that the average copyright date of a book in a Houston school library was 1975. "That data was the key to getting him to understand it," Hundemer says of Paige, who is now the U.S. Secretary of Education. Last year, Paige provided $2 million to update Houston's collections.

Follett Library Services will clean up MARC records and compile data on the size, Dewey number breakdown, and age of a school's collection, whatever automation system it uses. The basic rate for this service is $250 per school. Follett Software Company's automation products, Circulation Plus and Catalog Plus, allow users to create reports that help analyze their collections. These Follett products generate two reports—collection age by call number, and collection age by subject.

But Follett is not alone in helping librarians generate such reports. Last March, the Sagebrush Corporation released a new online service, BenchMARC, that goes a few steps further than the Follett products. BenchMARC allows librarians to evaluate their own collections. Librarians can see how their collections stack up against the collections of a comparable group of schools that have been designated Blue Ribbon Schools by the Department of Education and also have award-winning libraries. The service also recommends recent titles that can be used to update a collection, once BenchMARC has created a report. At Sagebrush's site, librarians can sign up for two free evaluative reports, but those who pay for a full subscription receive more detailed analyses of the size and age of their collections by Dewey number. The service also suggests replacement titles that can be ordered from Sagebrush's Econo-Clad division. BenchMARC costs $295 per year per school.

Gail Mazure, senior database services manager for Sagebrush and the force behind BenchMARC, says that regular analysis of a media center's collection will help media specialists get funding from grants and from district budgets. This is true, she says, particularly in the wake of reports such as Keith Lance's Colorado study and the Texas State Library's study, which demonstrate the effect of librarians and good collections on academic achievement in schools. Sagebrush, says Mazure, is developing a clearinghouse of grant information from the public and private sectors for BenchMARC subscribers. For more information, visit www.sagebrushcorp.com/dataservices/benchmarc.cfm.

Carol A. Clarke, library media coordinator at Combs Leadership Magnet School in Raleigh, NC, used BenchMARC to evaluate her collection and "I loved it," she says. "[It] told me specifically by Dewey number which areas I should improve. I took this data and then compared it against the curriculum set out by the state of North Carolina and decided on which areas I would focus first." As she receives more funding, she says she plans to use BenchMARC to update her collection.

Still, not everyone has the money to use these new products and services. Martha Alewine, South Carolina State Library's media consultant, says she knows of the services and new products, but as good as they may be, many school libraries can't afford them. Alewine has been coordinating a survey of the collections in her state's school districts, and she hopes to show the results to legislators this fall as documentation for a request to bolster school library collections before legislators finalize the state education budget. (For information on the 2001 survey, visit the South Carolina School Library Media Services page at www.myscschools.com/offices/ technology/ms/lms.)

Although Sagebrush offered a three-month BenchMARC subscription to South Carolina school libraries for $99, most schools still couldn't afford it. According to Gail Mazure, 15 media specialists in South Carolina used it, in either the free or subscription versions, to generate their reports. Some with Follett systems, Alewine says, that generated collection reports used them to compile the survey data, and others had to do the best they could manually. The survey results showed that there are school library collections in South Carolina with average copyright dates as old as 1950. Yet some school administrators, Alewine says, "don't want media specialists to throw books away because a school needs 10 books per student for accreditation." She hopes that hard data, similar to what Jim Hundemer generated in the Houston district, will convince adminstrators and legislators alike that students can't learn science—or much else—out of 40-year-old books.