The inductive method of evaluating the book collection of a library consists of taking a sample of titles in the library's collection and searching them in each of several reviewing Journals, book selection tools, and retrospective bibliographies. Those titles which are found in all or most such tools can be accepted äs desirable; those found in no such tool are probably of low quality and undesirable (or alternatively may be local publications); and those found in only one or two such tools are probably borderline in quality and should be reconsidered. Some earlier uses of this method have been described (l).This particular application of inductive evaluation was made in 1978/79, of a sample of adult books of individual biography in the main library of the Kingston and St. Andrew Parish Library, Jamaica (hereafter referred to äs KSAPL) (2). The Parish Library was organized in 1955; in 1978 it served a population of 620,000 persons, and KSAPL itself had 100,905 volumes of which 43% were adult non-fiction.In October, 1978, every second title on the shelves in the area of adult individual biography, was selected for study -275 titles and 354 copies, a ratio of l to 1.2. A complete list of all the titles appears in the füll report of this investigation (3). Each book was examined and certain Information recorded, e.g., year of publication, year of acquisition, number of recorded circulations for each year, physical condition, number of pages, number of illustrations, etc. In this library when a date due slip is filled, a new one is added by being pasted along the inner margin and without removing the old one. Only when a book is rebound is this circulation record destroyed; 193 books (55% of the total) had been rebound by the Library at one time or another, and the date due slip showed only the circulation since rebinding. Another 30 books (8%) had not been rebound but in each a filled-up date due slip had clearly been removed when a new one was added. With the advice of senior.staff members of KSAPL, we estimated conservatively that rebound books and those with missing date due slips had each an average of 20 more loans than were shown. When we present circulation data here, we
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