[This a response to post no. 2544, reproduced below followed by the response.]
no.2544, From: Beth Jacoby <bjacoby_at_hshsl.umaryland.edu>
Although we are mostly an academic health sciences library, we
also serve the faculty and students of our School of Social Work.
We have been charged with evaluating our social work resources to
determine if we could be doing better.
We plan to compare our holdings to those of libraries known to be
strong in social work; compare our journal holdings against those
indexed in Social Work Abstracts; and perhaps set up an approval
plan with a general academic vendor to cover social work,
retrospective and current. (Our current approval plan vendor
doesn't cover social work.)
1. Can you suggest names of libraries strong in social work against
which we can compare our holdings?
2. Do you know of any bibliographies in social work which aren't
too dated that we could also use?
3. Any other suggestions for approaching this task?
------------------
Response-
From: Beth Jacoby <bjacoby_at_hshsl.umaryland.edu>
Here is a summary of the responses I got to my query as to how to
approach the evaluation of our social work collection. I received 11
responses. Thanks to all who took the time to respond.
1. Names of libraries with strong SW collections (followed by
number of mentions in parentheses):
Univ. of Chicago (4)
Univ. of Michigan (4)
Columbia (3)
Univ. of Southern Calif. (3)
Washington Univ. (St. Louis) (3)
Univ. of Calif. at Berkeley (2)
Bryn Mawr College (1)
Case Western Reserve (1)
Emory Univ. (1)
Hunter College (1)
Loyola Univ., Chicago (1)
Pittsburgh Univ. (1)
Simmons College (1)
Univ. of Illinois, Chicago (1)
Univ. of Illinois, Urbana Champaign (1)
Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro (1)
US News and World Report has a ranking of Graduate Schools
in Social Work. See:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/beyond/gradrank/gbsocwrk.htm
2. Bibliographies in social work:
a. _Building the Undergraduate Social Work Library: An
Annotated Bibliography_. Council on Social Work Education.
Grafton H. Hull, Jr. et al. Rev. ed. 1993. [Limited to undergrad
and books, no journals.]
b. _Studies of Research on Social Work Practice_ . National
Assn. of Social Workers, 1986.
c. _Interprofessional Education and Practice_ / by Kathleen
Kirk Bishop. Council on Social Work Education, 1997.
3. Suggestion for approaching the evaluation:
a. Set up an approval plan with a vendor like YBP
b. Involve social work faculty to find out top schools, identify
gaps in holdings, etc.
c. Use ISI's Social Sciences Journal Citation Reports for
rankings of journals by impact factor.
d. Look at web pages of libraries strong in social work, for e.g.
Columbia University
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/indiv/socwk/
Washington University
http://gwbweb.wustl.edu/library/
University of Michigan
http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/Social.lib/social.html
University of Chicago
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/ssa/
University of California at Berkeley
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/SOCW/
Received on Wed Jan 05 2000 - 09:56:32 EST