Current Literature and the State Budget

Acquisitions Department
Christine Fischer
20 July 2009

What to read when you want a break from scholarly material?

Popular new book releases are just the thing. For the past two years, we have participated in the McNaughton book lease plan offered by Brodart. Each month we received newly published general fiction, non-fiction, mysteries, thrillers, romance, science fiction, and biography. The collection has grown to 700+ titles.

For those of you who regularly visited the Current Literature area in the main reading room to pick up the latest by Sedaris, Patterson, or Evanovich, the reduction in the state budget means the cancellation of this service effective July 1, 2009. No more shipments will be received.

The University Libraries will take advantage of Brodart’s low price purchasing option to keep those books with the most checkouts as well as those most recently received. We’ll ship about half the collection back to the vendor (with free shipping due to the volume) within the next two months.

The Acquisitions Department has enjoyed working with these materials, and we know from circulation statistics and word of mouth that this collection has been very popular. Director’s Station statistics from today indicate that 87% of these books have been checked out at least once. Eric Jerome Dickey’s Waking with Enemies has circulated 35 times! One hundred of the books were borrowed 10 or more times. We’ll hope to reinstate popular book leasing in the future.