COLLECTION GUIDELINES FOR THE FCCLB LIBRARY

The Library Team considers the following when accepting material:

• Currency (either recently published or of renewed interest)
• Relevance (discussed @ church or selected for reading/study)
• Availability/redundancy (is there already a copy in our collection or are LBPL copies available)
• Condition and format (hardcover or “trade” paperbacks with spine, cover, and pages intact and relatively clean—no torn or missing pages, no mold or mildew; no “mass-market” paperbacks, or any book with yellowing pages)

We prefer current subject matter (either fiction or non-fiction) in the following areas:

• Anti-racism, Civil rights, BIPOC (including Indigenous, AAPI, Latinx) experience
• LGBTQ+ issues
• Disability rights
• Challenged or banned books
• Environmentalism, climate change
• Spirituality, meditation, religion
• Poetry, music, visual arts
• Books read/studied in FCC adult ed. or book groups
• Popular “chapter books” for early readers, “issue novels” for middle grades and Young Adult (YA), and graphic novels

As a tiny church library, we’re not able to collect robustly or retrospectively in any field or subject area.

Books that we don’t select we try to give away on the FREE cart (metal, not wooden, cart), but we’re not able to deal with large donations that don’t meet our criteria. We have compiled a list of resources that might be of use to those of you who are re-distributing your ‘book wealth’—copies of that list are available in the FCC library.