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Education

Collection Development Policy Guidelines

  1. General Scope

    1. Audience
      Dartmouth's Education Department awards an undergraduate minor.  A long-standing program offering teaching education coursework and practica in local schools in preparation for New Hampshire teacher certification will be discontinued beginning in 2017. The Education program offers approximately fifteen courses per year, exploring human biological and cognitive development and its relation and application to learning. With a curricular focus on brain sciences and faculty affiliations with Dartmouth's Psychology and Brain Sciences (PBS) Department, students have increased opportunities to work with faculty and PBS graduate students' research. Likewise, the Library's education collection greatly benefits from the Library's doctoral-level psychology collection.

      The Library's collection also serves the needs of College faculty and administration, with materials addressing teaching, policy, and student services in higher education.

    2. Boundaries
      The majority of our education collection classes in the Library of Congress L through LD call number range, with significant amount of material classing in the psychology BF range.

      Rauner Library houses the College archives, documenting early higher education in New England, including Native American education, and Dartmouth's transition to coeducation. Rauner's illustrated books collection offers an extensive range of children's literature, including the Edward Sine collection of British illustrated books-- a valuable resource for historical children's literature and texts; the papers of Robert May, author of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer; the papers of Theodor Geisel, including a large collection of his Dr. Seuss children's books. In 2007, Rauner acquired the Morton E. Wise Collection of Maurice Sendak, which includes Sendak's books and original artwork.  Rauner also houses Dartmouth's collection of student theses.

    3. Partnerships
      Dartmouth currently has no collaborative collection program in place with any of our partners. Consortial pricing through CRL, NERL, and WALDO has facilitated our purchase of several online databases.

  2. Specific Delimitations to collecting in this subject area

    1. Languages
      Primarily English.

    2. Geographical Areas (if applicable)
      Primarily U.S coverage, but with a global representation for comparative studies.

    3. Types of Materials Collected
      Monographs and scholarly journals are collected most intensively. Also desirable are trade journals, film, government documents, statistical compilations, as well as full-text and bibliographic reference resources such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, bibliographies, and indexing services.

      The Library does not collect K-12 curricular materials, kits, etc. and focuses instead on scholarly works. The Education Department maintains its own curricular materials library for teacher education students.

    4. Format of Materials Collected
      Print and remotely-hosted digital material are the predominant formats. Where available, electronic journals are desired so long as that format does not limit full use of the content, and there is reliable perpetual access. We select an increasing number of electronic books, but prefer print when the content is difficult to navigate as a digital file. Preferred physical formats for audio-visual material is currently DVD. While not excluded entirely, we avoid microforms and VHS unless no other option is available. At this time, we are unable to purchase digital media for local hosting.

    5. Collective Collections
      We are fortunate to have access to several key doctoral-level collections through our Borrow Direct service, and the wider OCLC network through Interlibrary Loan. The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is particularly valuable for its collection of historical textbooks.

  3. Revision History
    ● revised August 2016, Amy Witzel
    ● Last revised Feb. 1999 (William McEwen)
    ● Current selector: Amy L. Witzel