Collection Development
The goal of collection development is to make sure that the library adequately and fairly supports each teaching area of the college. Responsibility for book selection lies both with the faculty and the library staff. Faculty members are largely responsible for recommending the acquisitions of materials in their subject areas. It is the responsibility of the library staff to maintain the reference collection and to obtain new books of general interest.

Because Virginia Western is a two-year college, most of the books acquired by the library should be at an introductory or undergraduate level. However, the acquisition of material to enable faculty to keep up with the growth of knowledge in their fields is also desirable, because this promotes faculty development and ultimately benefits the student. Therefore, the library may from time to time acquire graduate level material.

Procedure for Requests
To make sure that individual instructors do not lack materials to recommend, the library staff stimulates the interest and activity of faculty by routing announcements and reviews of books on a routine basis.

The request procedure is simple and flexible. Instructors may submit requests through e-mail or in writing or by phoning the library. It is also acceptable to sign Choice cards or to submit publishers' catalogs, flyers, and other listings with the wanted material checked off.

The library has for many years subscribed to Choice's Book Reviews on Cards, which is a publication of the American Library Association. Each monthly set of cards contains about 500 reviews written by subject specialists and intended for an academic audience. Librarians route packets of Choice cards, which are divided by subject area, to instructors in the various disciplines. An instructor initials his or her recommendations and forwards the packet to the next instructor on the list (the list is affixed to the packet envelope).

For each recommended title, whether from Choice or some other source, a staff member captures bibliographic information from the CD-ROM version of Books in Print and passes it into the book acquisitions database. Added to the acquisitions record is the requester's initials, which enables staff to notify the requester when the book is received.

Gifts
Gift books are added to the collection if they are relevant to the curriculum and contain current information. Otherwise, they are disposed through Duplicate Exchange or by some other means.

The library does not have rooms or spaces that can be devoted to special collections, i.e., donated collections cannot be kept intact. The library will choose what is to be cataloged from any set of donated books, and those books will be integrated with the rest of the collection.

Departmental Collections
Items for departmental collections should be purchased with departmental funds. Books purchased out of the library's book budget will become part of the library's collection.