As part of our strategic framework’s emphasis on curating the collection to meet the needs of the Tufts community, we are in the process of working on two collections projects.
Congressional Hearings in Government Documents
A few years ago, Tisch purchased ProQuest Congressional, which allows full-text searching of Congressional hearings, and includes links to related documents. It is much easier to use than visiting the print collection to locate a hearing, and is a comprehensive collection of hearings, unlike our print collection.
For these reasons, we feel the hearings in our print government documents collection on Level 1 can be withdrawn. Working with a recycling company and under the guidance of our regional government documents repository, the Boston Public Library, we plan to remove the print hearings from our government documents collection over the winter.
Reference Collection at Tisch Library
A second project we are working on this year concerns our print reference collection located on the main floor of Tisch Library (floormaps).
Our reference material is ripe for review: some material has gone out of date; some titles we already have in a digital version; and some are in formats that have been superseded entirely (e.g. print directories). Our goal is to conclude the project with a print reference collection that meets the needs of the Tufts community. We think a smaller print reference collection will allow it to be more usable and useful.
It is a pretty big collection so the project will go in phases. In the initial phase, our liaison librarians are prioritizing big sets. As we move into later stages of the project with trickier decisions, we will provide updates on the status and may seek to engage the Tufts community more directly.
More info
For more information, check out a short presentation made to the AS&E Faculty Library Committee on 10/29/21. For questions or concerns, please contact Martha Kelehan, Assistant Director, Research & Learning at martha.kelehan@tufts.edu or reach out to your department’s library liaison.
