If you have suggestions for this guide, please contact the EBSS Curriculum Materials Committee. (ALA Members can login to view email addresses.)
Below are some ways to investigate acquiring K-12 textbooks for your CMC. These focus on acquiring print version of K-12 textbooks. At this time, acquiring electronic versions for your CMC is difficult.
Collection development policies are critical documents for CMCs to have in order to clearly communicate selection and deselection criteria, policies regarding reconsideration concerns, and more. CMC librarians and personnel should have clear collection development policies which are up to date and shared with other library or university personnel.
Curriculum Materials Centers and Collections can be organized in a myriad of ways and while there are some professional trends, there is not a clear standard. It is common for CMCs to organize collections into smaller sections to be more browsable for users. But what those section are, how they are labled, and how they are organized differ. Often times CMCs will have different organization approaches across sections. It is common in some CMCs for fiction materials to be alphabetized and informational materials organized by the Dewey Decimal System. If Library of Congress classicification it is more commonly used across all sections of the CMC.
Below are examples from different universities to demonstrate different approaches.
Many CMC librarians are being purposeful in their assessment of the diversity of voices, identities, and lived experiences which are represented by their collection and their selections. While the following tools are geared towards children's literature (and a subset of it) they are two examples of tools which automate such a report for librarians who are just getting started with this evaluative work.
