Ambitious Curation--Better than shelling out for nonfiction?

From the Young Adult Library Services blog post by Hannah Gomez :

“Blogs like Awful Library Books love to poke fun at the fact that non-fiction in libraries gets very dated very fast. It’s true, but what can you do about it? As I recycled a big pile of magazines the other day, and when I came across this Unclutterer post, I had an idea. Why not compile some binders or folders (physical and/or digital) of articles, blog posts, book reviews, and other timely publications on topics of high interest and high turnover rate to teens, like health, dating, and technology so that you have a non-fiction resource that’s guaranteed to always be up to date? If you’re already using Pinterest, start a new page. Otherwise, start signing up for RSS feeds and a Twitter account to grab relevant links and put them somewhere where your patrons can have easy access. Make sure you make note of this on your library website and perhaps in your physical nonfiction stacks as well. If you don’t have time to follow as many blogs as you’d like, assign a topic each to your interns, volunteers, or advisory board members. Not only are you providing a great service to your patrons, then, but it becomes a great exercise in how to do research, how to use technology or publishing tools, and how to gauge an article’s relevance and integrity.” 

My book budget is still puttering along at about a fifth of what it was three years ago, before I got here. (It dropped from $13,000 to $1,000 that year.) For the past two years I've been doing my best to keep my readers in the best new fiction as it comes out and developing modern and postmodern novel collections with the English department, but nonfiction has been daunting. So much collection development for nonfiction relies upon sets of books--a 13-book series on social issues, a 5-volume set on recent presidents, and so on, but let's face it, when you're a high school student anything older than 4 or 5 years old is positively ancient, and so many of the nonfiction topics my library users are interested in change rapidly in that time.

Wow, but relaxing on nonfiction CD in favor of electronic resource curation is a huge idea, and one I'd prefer to get right within the first couple of tries. I'm thinking maintaining a collection of LiveBinders on different subjects, all organized pretty similarly, would be helpful, as would a stack on Delicious, or a library resources wiki. LiveBinders seems like an obvious choice because I really like being able to see webpages before I go to the trouble of clicking a link, and I can find relevant articles in our paid databases and add a note describing where to go to find more like that.

So, just thinking out loud here. Some of my most common topics for research papers are:

1. marijuana--legalization/medical use, etc
2. abortion
3. homelessness
4. euthanasia
5. animal rights/animal abuse
6. school reform
7. gay marriage
8. healthcare
9. government spending
10. renewable energy

Curating links and resources for each of these topics seems like a logical and helpful course of action because information on most of these topics either a) change by the minute or b) comes from sources with a political or ideological perspective. It definitely seems like giving kids a starting point of good examples of research sources would help them know what to look for as they continue researching. It would also be an AMAZING assignment for my student aides to get their research, evaluation, and organization skills going. Even better would be if I could get a teacher to have students or groups of students pull together one of these as a prelude to a research paper or project.

It would make sense for each binder to be organized in a similar way, with a section for background/history of the issue, online resources or databases containing facts, opinion pieces, links to blogs or other social media for people who are involved with the issue, and maybe even a breakdown of the smaller pieces of the larger topic. At first I was thinking maybe they'd all have the same 4 or 5 sections, but I don't think each topic is going to split up that easily; I may want to develop the organizational structure of the LiveBinder before turning it over to my aides.

Beyond nonfiction resources for research, there are other topics kids are interested in for which I can't keep my print resources current. These are subjects like:
photography

1. web design
2. programming
3. app development
4. cooking
5. health and exercise
6. sports
7. manga

Most of these are so far down on my priority list that I don't even try to keep up unless something new and exciting gets reviewed in SLJ or something like that, but certainly not anything I can afford to keep current, not in print anyway.

So: another project added to the pile. Is this the year I get really good at delegating while also ensuring the delegate-ees maintain top quality?