The authors analyzed bibliographies from three departments' undergraduate senior theses, with the goal of improving both collection development and information literacy instruction. Though undergraduate students were not citing major journals or key authors, the study revealed popular research topics, which will inform collection development. The finding that the library owned 70% of the journal articles undergraduates cited suggests that they are more likely to cite what their own institution owns, and thus a strong collection can have a significant influence on undergraduate work. The data also prompted conversations with faculty about their expectations and current strategies for guiding undergraduate research, which will allow librarians to improve instruction.
Systematic evaluation of a library's collection can be a useful tool for collection development. After reviewing three evaluation methods and their usefulness for our small academic library, I undertook a usagebased evaluation, focusing on narrow segments of our collection that served specific undergraduate courses. For each section, I collected data on the number of books owned, number of checkouts in the past four years, and number of unique books used. Using examples from the data, I discuss possible ways to interpret and act on the data. I also note how the knowledge gained from this evaluation fits into the larger toolkit of librarian competencies for collection development.oing collection development well involves a variety of information: about the library's mission, the needs of users, strengths and weaknesses of the current collection, and tools for identifying quality resources. An evaluation of a library's collection can be a useful piece of the collection development toolkit, as it helps the library understand whether the collection is adequate and whether, or in what specific areas, it needs to grow. After reviewing several methods for collection evaluation and considering both their feasibility and the assumptions behind them, I selected usage-based evaluation as the most appropriate method for Arcadia University (in Glenside, PA), and I evaluated selected segments of our library collection based on how heavily they were used. The sections I evaluated were chosen to correspond to specific courses taught at the university. This was not a comprehensive evaluation of the library collection but rather a chance to gather information related to particular sections, namely, the print collection that serves undergraduate courses. My goal was to determine through quantitative measures how these materials were being used and to use the results to direct purchasing and weeding.In this article, I discuss how data fit into the larger picture of librarians' role in collection development and review examples from library literature of the ways in which librarians at other institutions have used data to influence weeding or purchasing. I then explain how I assigned call number ranges to individual courses, namely all the 200-and 300-level courses offered by Arcadia University. This represents the middle levels of Arcadia's undergraduate curriculum, which ranges from 100-level (introductory) to 400-level (usually restricted to seniors). I collected the following data on each call number range: how many books we own, how crl-295
Many studies have tried to identify factors that make electronic books (e-books) in academic libraries more likely to be used. For instance, are demand-driven acquisitions used more than titles in packages? Are e-books in the sciences used more than e-books on art? Most of these studies are limited to one or two variables. This study introduces logistic regression, which can incorporate multiple variables to determine which factors are the most useful in predicting e-book usage. The variables considered in this study are LC class, university press or other publisher, and platform. In the collection studied, the classes with the highest odds of being used were A (General Works), followed by F (History of the Americas), H (Social Sciences), and Q (Math and Science).
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