Gardner-Harvey Library Collection Policy

The focus of the Gardner-Harvey Library and its collection is to support the needs of students as they learn, faculty as they research and teach, and the entire campus community as they encounter information for educational and recreational purposes. The Library will pursue this mission within the constraints of funding and space. Additional guidelines for this policy include:

• Purchase requests can be made using the online form or by contacting the appropriate staff member.
• A selection of current course textbooks will be purchased each semester.
• Donated items will be added to the library if they support the overall collection focus.
• Preference is given to purchasing ebooks where possible.
• Items in the collection will be regularly assessed based on usage. When items are selected for withdrawal, attention will be paid to their existence in other Miami or OhioLINK libraries. Items owned by fewer than five OhioLINK libraries will be sent to the Southwest Ohio Regional Depository (SWORD) for long term storage.
• The library supports the American Library Association's Library Bill of Rights and the Intellectual Freedom Principles for Academic Libraries.
• The library is committed to representing diverse communities and a diversity of authors within our collection. Though a collection-wide assessment is needed, we did complete a project in 2022 with the Ohio Collection Analysis Initiative to assess the diversity of our juvenile book collection and our young adult book collection. Our juvenile books are 30% diverse, and our young adult books are 40% diverse.