Building Together: Sequential Art Collection Development for an Interdisciplinary Community

Setting out to build a Graphic Novel collection for our library to meet the needs of our School of Art & Design's Comics and Sequential Art program, Department of English, and to provide high-demand leisure reading, we faced many challenges. What began with a new professor's request for graphic novels that she assigned for her classes, which were not in the collection, became an interdisciplinary and multipurpose pursuit. The uniqueness of the program and the holistic purpose of the collection compounded the need for it. As we tried a whole-student approach to support our students and two academic disciplines, we were starting out with very few graphic novels in the collection, which were not shelved together. During this process, we explored acquisition options, such as year-end and grant funding, leased collections, and interdepartmental and interdisciplinary collaboration within the library and university. This session discusses how we got here, our project's progress, inspirations and frustrations, and what we have learned so far.