Collections and resources

Sophisticated picture books display.

Building an inclusive and balanced school library collection requires good planning. The cycle of tasks, including selecting, buying and removing resources, can involve your whole school community including library staff, teachers and students.

Contents

School library collections need to be thoughtfully managed.

Collections and collection management

How you manage your library's collection is important to the success of learning and literacy in your school. Your collection will better meet your school’s needs if it's balanced, inclusive and managed through well-planned processes.
Plan your collections.

Your collection management plan

Before you can make a collection management plan for a balanced and inclusive library, you need to find out about your existing collection and your school community. A vision for your collection can be a useful reference for choosing resources.
Girl browsing te reo books.

Building an inclusive collection

An inclusive library collection reflects the diversity of your school in ways that support teaching and learning.
Selecting resources.

Selecting resources for your collection

Developing criteria and procedures to find, choose and buy items, accept donations or handle complaints makes your school library collection easier to manage.
Assess your collection.

Assessing your school library collection

By assessing your collection you can find out which areas are well covered, where gaps exist, how well it provides for the needs of your students and where you should focus your ongoing collection development.
Withdrawn books.

Weeding your school library collection

Weeding is an important part of the collection management cycle. Our weeding guide tells you what weeding is, why, when and how to weed your school library collection, and who should be involved.
School libraries
Collections and resources