The next time you have trouble finding four textbooks in Norris Bookstore, try handling 80,000.
The seven bibliographers at the Collection Management Office of University Library are in charge of adding that many volumes each year to the library’s collection of four million.
The bibliographers are responsible for the budgets of academic departments that purchase new books, said Thomas Mann, bibliographer for the departments of anthropology, sociology, and German and Slavic literatures.
“In some schools, professors have a budget for buying books,” he said. “Here at Northwestern, as with most schools in the country, the bibliographer is responsible for it.”
Bibliographers work closely with their assigned departments during the book selection process.
While the office consists primarily of the bibliographers, there are more than twenty other people who help select books for academic departments.
The bibliographers have a different budget for each department, depending on the subject’s importance to NU.
“Our agriculture department doesn’t have a large budget at all,” Mann said. “Our Africana collection is particularly outstanding and complete, while our Transportation and Music collections are excellent.”
NU’s library has a reciprocal agreement with the one at the University of Chicago, well-known for its extensive East Asian collection, said Charlotte Cubbage, the bibliographer for several departments, including English and American literatures and dance. The collection totals 620,000 volumes in several languages.
Even with collections like these available, it can still be difficult for a bibliographer to get a particular book.
“It can be a real problem,” Mann said. “The books are sometimes out of print or difficult to locate.”
Although bibliographers find it difficult to add to NU’s collection, students said they have a hard time navigating through the books already available.
“The selection of books can be inaccessible at times,” Weinberg freshman Jason Wang. “It gets really frustrating when I don’t get my book when I want it.”
Mann said the inaccessibility is “a problem that the department is attempting to deal with.”
The office is also trying to make it easy for students to help select books. Students can order books through the “suggest a purchase” option at NUcat.
This sends requests to the bibliographers, who then contact publication houses, such as Aux Amateurs de Livres, Casalini Libri, Otto Harrasowitz and the Yankee Book Peddler, for resources published in English and other languages.
Some students, such as Weinberg freshman Nitika Gupta, said they were unaware that they had a say in the purchasing process.
“I had no idea (the option) existed,” she said.
Reach Pritish Behuria at [email protected].
