NCLA Con 2025

Libraries are always looking for new and innovative opportunities to serve the needs of their patrons. Adding manga to an academic library's collection offers an invaluable opportunity to promote inclusivity, diversity, and accessibility within higher education environments. As a distinct medium that blends art and narrative, manga has garnered significant global popularity, transcending cultural boundaries and appealing to a broad range of readers. The incorporation of manga into academic library collections supports the educational and social goals of inclusivity by offering a broader, more diverse spectrum of content that reflects various lived experiences and viewpoints. This collection management project started by creating and expanding the library's popular reading collection. The idea was to provide students with an opportunity to use the library for more than just studying. They are given the chance to make recommendations for the collection by commenting on social media posts or sharing them at events like the annual connect fair (an event for freshmen to explore the different departments and clubs on campus). Through these interactions, we found a need to expand the collection to include manga. The addition of manga to an academic library collection does pose some unusual challenges, particularly in terms of classification and cataloging. Popular manga titles are increasingly being made available in public libraries, but only a relatively small number of academic libraries have begun adding them to their collections. While many manga MARC records do contain call numbers, these are invariably either Dewey Decimal system call numbers or PZ call numbers under LC classification. Gardner-Webb has tried to move away from using PZ call numbers for all but children's books, so we need to assign our own LC call numbers to almost all incoming manga series titles. Further complicating matters is the fact that manga can be assigned LC call numbers based on different criteria by different institutions - by collection name, by author, by title, etc. There seems to be a lack of consistency in cataloging practice among academic libraries, and a lack of non-PZ LC call numbers in existing MARC records inhibits the addition of manga titles by copy cataloging alone. This poses a real challenge to academic libraries who may no longer have an experienced catalog librarian on staff.