The formats that will be generally included in Hamilton's Popular culture collection include: books, periodicals, textbooks, reprints, dissertations, theses, microforms, maps, musical scores, audio materials, videos, films, CD-ROM databases (if available), and Internet sources (via access). Items that will generally not be included are newspapers, pamphlets, art works, posters, and tests. Local popular culture authors may be selected; however rare books, manuscripts, realia, and archival materials are discouraged.
Children's materials are not collected for a lack of audience. Fiction is encouraged along with non-fiction. Materials collected will be in English. A minimal amount of popular works will be selected while the primary focus will be on research and scholarly materials. A second copy of a reference work may be purchased to circulate if the work is primarily prose rather than statistics, charts or other ready reference material, as in the case of the three volume set Handbook of American Popular Culture. There will be no need for reserve material because the popular culture courses are designed for upper division students and graduate students who will be performing research on individual topics which match their interests. Government documents will be included in the depository government documents collection and will include items with statistical information on America, television statistics, and other government publications which are relevant.
The following has been implemented due to budgetary restraints. Acquisitions procedures do not adhere to the formerly used procedure of blanket and/or standing orders. As of when this policy is written, there is no standing approval plan, meaning the library has no commitment to purchase items from jobber(s). There are no blanket orders for the discipline of American Studies or popular culture items, nor are there standing orders for series materials. Currently selectors examine the order slips (one item represented per slip) sent to them from the jobber, which adhere to previously established preliminary selection standards. The selector then chooses materials which s/he feels are the best items to add to the collection in their professional opinion.
Gifts shall be gratefully received from donors. Gift items will be treated as any other materials intended for inclusion in the collection. If the selecting librarian finds the gift item of value, is not duplicated, or an item too expensive for otherwise inclusion, the librarian may include it in the collection. If the gift item is not current, in poor condition, not valuable in terms of subject matter, repeated, out of scope, or any other reason the librarian deems necessary, the gift items shall not be included in the collection. After this conclusion, the item may be offered back to the donor/giver or disposed of as other deselected materials.
Expensive materials monographs over $100., serials with annual fees exceeding $80., and videotapes excessive of $150. in cost shall not be collected with out the majority's approval at the semesterly meeting of administration and collection development librarians.
American Studies and American popular culture are by nature interdisciplinary subjects. In the case of this discipline the selector must coordinate with the literature selector, the History selector, the Art selector, the Music selector, the Video selector, and with the selector of any other possible overlapping genre. Interdisciplinary majors are not meant to be problematic in selection and storage. If there may be a generalization made about interdisciplinary topics, the shortcoming falls on the library science, or rather classification end of spectrum rather than on the discipline itself. My prediction is that more areas of study will become interdisciplinary and the field of library and information science will need to respond to this issue by adapting the classification scheme.
All items classified by the following related subject slassification scheme will hold a level 3a-3c in the Conspectus subject evaluation. Films, videos, and musical recordings relating to American Studies will be no exception.