[original post followed by response.]
Subject: CDL: Published dates as a percentage of the collection, more
From: ann mccarthy <annlmcc_at_hotmail.com>
I to am interested in this subject as I am doing my master's thesis on
the the turnover rate of a collection as it relates to its relative
age. If there is anyone out there who knows of studies done on
determining the appropriate age of a collection as it relates to its
category, I would appreciate that information very much. My study
will involve a number of public libraries, I am trying to determine if
the most current collections are the ones with the highest
circulation.
==#4==
Subject: Re: CDL: Published dates as a percentage...(response 3)
From:Linwood DeLong <linwood.delong_at_uwinnipeg.ca>
I don't know the answer to this question. I doubt that there are
published standards on published dates as a percentage of an ideal
collection. Our approach, in collection evaluation issues like this,
has been to match ourselves against what we considered to be our
institutional peers. For specific areas of our collection it was
fairly easy to find 4 or 5 other academic libraries with similar FTE
and similar teaching and research mandates. Since many OPACs can now
limit by date, it was also possible to do a series of keyword searches
that together would come close to identifying the titles in a given
subject area or subject discipline and then limit the results to the
most recent 10 years (or whatever time span we were interested in).
Right away we were able to get a sense of the number of titles in a
10-year time span as a portion of the estimated total number of items.
Much of this work could be carried out by a student researcher,
with a bit of instruction.
In one case, a theology collection, we had to look around a bit to
find institutions with a similar theology program to ours, but with so
many online searchable collections to choose from, we always felt that
we had identified more or less comparable institutions.
We also went the next step of identifying titles that were held by
more than one institution. Once we found titles that were held by
three institutions or more, we considered these to be "benchmark"
titles, which we could then compare with our own collection. We were
creating a recommended list of titles "on the fly", so to speak.
To help us stretch a bit, we also included at least one institution
that was larger than ours, but we didn't try to match our colleciton
against those of ivy league universities or major research
institutions.
The standards or percentages that result from an exercise such as ours
lack the legitimacy of standards that are set by a major library body,
such as ACRL, ARL, CARL, but we still felt that we achieved meaningful
results.
Linwood DeLong
University of Winnipeg
Linwood DeLong
Reference Coordinator
University of Winnipeg Library
515 Portage Ave.
Winnipeg, MB, Canada
R3B 2E9
Ph. (204) 786-9124
FAX (204) 786-1824
e-mail: linwood.delong_at_uwinnipeg.ca
Received on Tue Nov 23 2004 - 02:55:02 EST