Help Me Help You: The Floyd County Library and IU Southeast Library Partnership

Academic libraries, of all sizes, have often struggled with the role that they should play in providing a leisure reading collection to the students, faculty, and staff that use their collections. Some academic libraries, especially those affected by recent reductions to their library collection budgets, question whether they should invest limited collection dollars in leisure reading materials that cannot be aligned with curriculum or research support. Other academic libraries wrestle with how to provide leisure reading or how much to provide. Do they rely on approval plans, or library staff and patron selections or both? Do they provide print (often the preferred leisure reading format) or digital (now that OverDrive has a bigger presence in the academic market), or both? The Indiana University Southeast (IU Southeast) Library has also struggled with these questions. To resolve them, IU Southeast looked to current academic and public library partnership models and turned toward its local public library, the Floyd County Library, to alleviate the widening gaps in its leisure reading collection and to extend access to library collections and services to the IU Southeast campus and the greater Floyd County community.