ETL 503 Acquisitions

Our school library is a long way from the nearest quality bookshop. If we wanted to access a Collins Bookstore for instance, we'd need to travel for an hour and a quarter to get there. Selection and acquisiton for us will never be an exercise in browsing vendor's shelves. There is however a small independant bookshop that now operates 40 minutes drive away. It specialises in a range of cheap non-fiction titles and a smattering of local history. For the Social Science curriculum this kind of material is golden.
   What about satisfying the rest of the curriculum? There is always the ubiquitous Big W which stocks celebrity best sellers, pulp fiction, memoirs and fad cookbooks. As a fan of Young Adult Fiction I am always disappointed in this store. Vampire romances bore me and I have had enough of the Wimpy Kid and Rangers Apprentice. Where is all that brilliant top grade teen fiction?
   Well some of it magically appears each motnth when the standing orders come through from Lamont Books. Otherwise we have to search for it, peruse Magpies and Viewpoint and order more titles (usually from Lamont) or occassionally we are gifted with a suitable tome.
   As for electronic acquisitions, much of it is still new to us and the library staff are scratching their heads over what to do about ebooks. No doubt it will all become clearer once our TL quizes more TLs in the region about what they are doing. So far the policy appears to be 'wait and see', but the major obstacle to e-resources is making sure we have reliable internet access. Over the recent five week block that I worked at the school the internet was down for two weeks out of the five. Why buy resources that you can't access, is the TL's view. She's sticking with print for now.
   The TL has a policy of supporting the local independant bookstore as much as she can, picking up super cheap copies of popular titles at big W and acquiring the rest of the collection via Lamont. Of course I haven't touched on the Audio visual content of the library. I'm afraid I don't know what the system is to do with these items.