Poetry Collection Evaluation and Findings

I looked at every 6 books in the 811 section of our non-fiction (North American poetry). I first found that we have a lot of books with incorrect Dewey numbers...almost all the books I looked at were in 811.54 (North American poetry of the latter half of the twentieth century), but some were written in different centuries, and some not reviewed here but observed were from authors outside of North America. One might be inclined to simplify the children's poetry section to just 811, but then that leaves out the English (not North America) poets in 821. We also have one Spanish poetry book in 861. I don't have a great solution for this problem at the moment.

I do see another problem in our collection: our collection has a lot of older titles, but not so many titles from the last ten years. I don't think we've done a great job of keeping up with new titles in the poetry section, and we often only get the breakthrough books (award winners like The Undefeated, or books that received starred reviews in SLJ or some other collection development publication.

I'd recommend we get some of former Young People's Poet Laureate, Naomi Shihab Nye's books. There's one book that Kwame Alexander contributed to and was a critically acclaimed poetry book, I Remember: Poems and Pictures of Heritage that I recommend we purchase. I think continuing to add poetry to our displays is important for it to be seen, and not hidden in the often overlooked non-fiction collection (that is also something to think on).

I didn't review the graphic novel section because I have ordered almost all the books on those shelves and have an intimate knowledge of them; but also because a lot of them get so much use they are almost all in poor-fair physical condition. It's interesting to see the contrast, seeing books almost as old as me still in great condition. On the one hand, it's nice to have books withstand time, but it's only because they don't check out nearly as much as other collections. If a poetry book checks out twice in a year, I'd consider it one of the more popular titles in our collection. On the other hand, if a graphic novel did not check out 11 times in a year, it's one of our lower circulating items in the collection.