For the past few weeks, I've been working on a collection evaluation project for the library's music collection. The project is now drawing to a close, and I'm pretty pleased. MCPL's collection is certainly a good one, but there are also holes according to some of the lists and books I worked with to create my checklist.
I used a combination of three different lists to create my checklist, and I kept track of overlap between the lists. The same artists popped up over and over again, but it wasn't always the same album. I kept track of whether the library had the album, whether we had other albums by the artists, whether I thought we needed to add the album to the collection if we didn't have it, and whether the album was readily available on CD. The final list gives the collection development librarians a place to start that isn't Billboard, so I feel satisfied.
I do wonder what the future of CD collections will be. Several of the albums I found were available as MP3s, but not as CDs. The library books provides audiobooks, but I'm not sure what the best method of sharing MP3 music will be for the library beyond the streaming services I saw at my undergraduate university. It will be interesting to see what becomes of this superb collection when CD players aren't as present as they are now (which is already less than they used to be).
