Estimating the audience level for library resources

O’Neill, Edward T.; Connaway, Lynn Silipigni; Dickey, Timothy J.

doi:10.1002/asi.20908

Cited by 12 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Academic librarians tend to order books to support educational and research needs based on requests by teaching faculty members, researchers, or students (see Association of College and Research Libraries, ). Academic library holding statistics may therefore reflect a combination of teaching and research impact, and these data are useful to assess the value of scholarly books (Calhoun, ; O'Neill, Connaway, & Dickey, ; Torres‐Salinas & Moed, , ). The term libcitation has been coined for the number of libraries holding a book based on national or international union catalogs as an indication of its “cultural benefit” (White et al., , p. 1087) and libcitations have been proposed to complement citations in the evaluation of humanities scholars (Linmans, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

CanAmazon.com reviews help to assess the wider impacts of books?

Kousha

Thelwall

2015

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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Although citation counts are often used to evaluate the research impact of academic publications, they are problematic for books that aim for educational or cultural impact. To fill this gap, this article assesses whether a number of simple metrics derived from Amazon.com reviews of academic books could give evidence about their impacts. Based upon a set of 2,739 academic monographs from 2008 and a set of 1,305 best-selling books in 15 Amazon.com academic subject categories, the existence of significant but low or moderate correlations between citations and numbers of reviews, combined with other evidence, suggests that online book reviews tend to reflect the wider popularity of a book rather than its academic impact, although there are substantial disciplinary differences. Metrics based upon online reviews are therefore recommended for the evaluation of books that aim at a wide audience inside or outside academia when it is important to capture the broader impacts of educational or cultural activities and when they cannot be manipulated in advance of the evaluation.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

CanAmazon.com reviews help to assess the wider impacts of books?

Kousha

Thelwall

2015

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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“…Ideally, it would be based on a combination of the two. Libraries might also look to how audience-level analyses of the collection and use of OCLC's WorldCat-derived evaluation tools (O'Neill, Connaway, and Dickey 2008) can provide insight to select for their users' distinct characteristics.…”

Section: Kellymentioning

confidence: 99%

Collection Development Policies in Public Libraries in Australia: A Qualitative Content Analysis

Kelly

2015

Public Library Quarterly

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The role that public library collection development policies play in guiding selectors and informing users has been promoted as a pillar of good professional practice. While these policies purport to open up the methods and the criteria used in selection so as to promote transparency and a sense of professional objectivity, how they actually are developed and put into practice has remained largely implicit in the research literature. This analysis revealed that policies tended to focus on local issues and remained heavily materials focused. How collections are developed to support user's information needs and substantive issues associated with topicality are largely unarticulated.Collection policies provide a direction to librarians and users on how their institution has chosen to meet the materials and information needs of its users. This process is a complex mix of factors that involve issues associated with how the library is constituted, managed, and funded; how it is staffed; how staff are trained in the specific roles of materials selection and evaluation; the personal proclivities of the staff-their Weltanschauungen; and the types of materials sought and their range, depth, and availability.Public libraries are faced with a need to make choices and to prioritize based on a set of defined criteria and practical procedures. Collection

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“…22 Providing title-level catalog records for microform collections also enables libraries to evaluate their collections for duplication and to make retention decisions. 23 With space becoming ever more precious, title-level cataloging allows libraries to create cooperative agreements to share microforms across multiple locations, thus reducing the microform footprint at a single library. 24 These issues are still occurring in today's information environment, and libraries need to better administer their microform collections.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Swimming with the Fiches: Reviving the International Aerospace Abstracts Collection to Make It Discoverable and Accessible to Researchers

Davis

Edmunds

2018

LRTS

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When the authors discovered a forgotten microfiche collection, they knew they needed to determine a process to make the information discoverable and accessible to researchers. Using a combination of manual data entry, cross-checking against printed indexes, and batch conversion of data using MarcEdit, they devised processes and workflows for creating reasonably good metadata for this large collection and for loading the MARC records into their local integrated library system. Their methods can serve as a model for any collection for which basic metadata would be useful in enhancing discovery and access.

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Estimating the audience level for library resources

Cited by 12 publications

References 20 publications

CanAmazon.com reviews help to assess the wider impacts of books?

CanAmazon.com reviews help to assess the wider impacts of books?

Collection Development Policies in Public Libraries in Australia: A Qualitative Content Analysis

Swimming with the Fiches: Reviving the International Aerospace Abstracts Collection to Make It Discoverable and Accessible to Researchers

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