What you said:

What we're doing:

Please buy more books in French!

In progress. We do purchase books in French in the area of French literature, language and translation since those are the areas of focus for our Études Franҫaises program. This year we have received some extra one-time money for acquisitions. Some of it will be used to improve our collection of French language material.

Concordia is an English university and so the majority of the books we buy to support our programs are in English. However, we would be happy to borrow any French language books you require (when available) from another institution.

Why are the books for my program being kept at the other campus library?

If there is a book you need for your work at the other campus, you can request online that it be sent to the library of your choice.

As to why it is being kept on the other campus, there are two possible reasons:

Reason 1: Some books are relevant to multiple programs and in those cases, the book is kept at the campus of the program it was ordered for.

Reason 2: Your department used to be on the other campus. When the department moved, the books never followed simply because there wasn’t space for them on the library shelves. We are undergoing a collections reconfiguration along with the renovations of the Webster Library. In this process, we will try as much as possible to have the collection on the campus where the department is.

Please arrange the print journals in a way that makes sense. It is very hard to locate specific journals.

At the moment, our print journals are arranged according to Library of Congress call numbers. We have asked our print journal working group to investigate the feasibility of alphabetizing them instead.

The journal collection is abysmal!!!!!!!!!

There are many journals I need for my research that I can’t access!

We need more journals!

Why don’t we subscribe to [specific journal title]?

We have current journals, but no access to the backfiles!

There were some comments that mentioned the names of specific journals. Some of those journals we actually do have access to, so if you are in doubt it never hurts to check with your librarian or at the Reference Desk. There were some journals named that we don’t have, and we have made a note of those and will consider them for future subscription if budget allows it.

Journals are tricky to finance because they use a subscription model. With books we pay a one-time fee and they are ours. With journals we have to pay a fee every year, and generally that fee increases each year. So not only do we have to make sure we have $3000 available this year to pay for it, we need to guarantee that we will have $3090 next year and $3183 the year after that and $3278 year after that. That can be tricky to guarantee with the way University budgets fluctuate.

This year, if there is enough money left over after all the other bills are paid, we will look at purchasing backfiles (which are predominately one-time fees) of high-use journals.

We should be buying more print books!

We should have all the books from important university presses!

My discipline relies heavily on print books and there is never enough available in the library in my area of research.

In progress. We have recently been given some additional funding to put towards our book purchases. If you have suggestions for specific titles please let us know by filling out this suggestion form.

However there are so many new books published each year and we will never be able to buy them all or have the shelf space to store them all. When it happens that we can’t purchase a book that you need, you can always use interlibrary loans.

Can you make the acquisitions policy public so we know how to make recommendations for book purchases?

If you think there is a book we should add to our collection, you can let us know here. Or you can email your suggestion directly to your subject librarian. Your subject librarian will also be more than happy to inform you about the acquisition policy for your subject area.