Collection Assessment and Acquisitions Budgets

Sul H Lee

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317951087
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This invaluable new book contains timely information about the assessment of academic library collections and the relationship of collection assessment to acquisition budgets. The rising cost of information significantly influences academic libraries'abilities to acquire the necessary materials for students and faculty, and public libraries'abilities to acquire material for their clientele. Collection Assessment and Acquisitions Budgets examines different aspects of the relationship between the assessment of academic library collections and the management of library acquisition budgets. Librarians, researchers, and representatives from major library vendors present studies and opinions on collection assessment and acquisition budgets. Collection Assessment and Acquisitions Budgets explores the issues and tools related to collection assessment and also presents insight into the relationships between libraries and vendors. Some of the topics covered by this volume include:

• current factors influencing libraries'abilities to acquire information
• an examination of trends affecting libraries and information vendors
• use studies and collection development
• management of acquisition funds
• criteria to evaluate information vendors
• relationships between libraries and vendorsThese informative chapters discuss current issues and present the latest research findings relating to collection assessment and acquisition budgets. Practicing librarians, students in the field, and librarians involved in administration and especially acquisitions and collection development will gain a better understanding of the complexities of collection and the factors affecting acquisitions budgets. Librarians will find practical information, including product reviews and opportunities to use automated tools in the assessment process, the benefits and problems of serial review projects, types of assistance vendors can provide libraries in the collection assessment process, the importance of collection assessment in the competition for funding, and ideas for the use of circulation data in the collection assessment process.

Locked in Conversation: The College Library Collection and the Pluralist Society

Robert L. Houbeck, Jr.

Do academic libraries buy conservative journals of opinion less frequently than liberal journals? Are academic collections in this area tilted to the left? Or has our collecting been evenhanded, consistent with our professional ethos of building balanced collections, uncontaminated by the ideological battles raging in the Academy and the larger society? How could we tell? And would it matter anyway? These are the questions I'd like to explore.

I've had this topic in mind for a while. A 1983 editorial in the FRANKFUERTER ALLGEMEINE¹ was one of my first prompts. The writer, Kurt Reumann, was commenting on the decay within universities of what he called a “Kultur des Streitens,” a culture of disputation. Argument within the Academy, he contended, had deteriorated into sloganeering. Rarely did he observe a genuine attempt to engage the spirit and substance of one's antagonist. Reumann recommended, as a remedy, the recovery and adaptation of the scholastic mode of argumentation. The rules of such disputation included the responsibility to re-state an opponent's position as dispassionately as possible and to offer arguments for that position that were even stronger than those advanced by one's adversary. The goal of debate, he argued-ideally, at least-should be the alignment of both participants with the truth of the real. Public disputation might then become an occasion at once for vigorous disagreement but also for the building up of civic amity, a form of the virtue of friendship. Instead, ideology, Reumann believed, had corroded that ideal and demanded the destruction of not only argument but also opponent. Might libraries, I wondered, reflecting on this editorial, be able to make a modest contribution to the recovery of civility in public disputation, both within the Academy and the society? It seemed to me that we might, so long as we lived up to our commitment to collect the documents of the disputing factions in an evenhanded manner. But were we doing that?

William Sheerin's recent piece in AMERICAN LIBRARIES² again brought this question to mind. Sheerin, you'll recall, relates his experience at an American Libraries Association meeting on patron access. The main speaker, a self-described “First Amendment purist,” cataloged “a variety of censorship threats to libraries, all of them coming from right-wing groups.’’ During the question period, Sheerin asked the speaker whether the refusal of a state-funded agency to accept donations of videotapes expressing an anti-abortion point of view might be, in principle and assuming the tapes met the agency's selection criteria, a form of censorship. Sheerin had in mind such a situation in his own region. The speaker's response, in contrast to his earlier passionate condemnation of censorious behavior, was “a bemused shrug of the shoulders.” Sheerin goes on to relate the reactions of a couple of audience members who, trying to be helpful, offered various reasons one might use for rejecting such pro-life materials. What distressed Sheerin was the “wink and grin” attitude that seemed to prevail among his colleague-participants. “Were political or ideological perspectives,” he asks, “leading these people to create rationales for the very sort of “covert censorship’ that they claimed to find intolerable?”³ A fair question. And, coming at just about the moment Sul called to ask if I'd agree to speak on collection assessment at this conference, an irresistable one.

Others have taken a whack at this particular stump. Stephen Hupp in a recent article⁴ examined the question of bias in collection development in Ohio libraries. Hupp used as the basis for his study two lists of books: 37 conservative titles which Moral Majority had used for one of its own surveys of American library collections; and 32 liberal/leftist titles used for a survey of academic libraries in three Southern states. Hupp found that conservative titles appeared more frequently in Ohio academic, public and special libraries than did liberal titles, casting “doubt on claims by (Jerry) Falwell, (Cal) Thomas, and others that American libraries ignore publications supporting conservative views.”⁵ But, he also reports, since “books from either bibliography are in no more than 15% of all Ohio libraries, it appears the state's libraries have done a poor job in collecting controversial political materials.”⁶

Hupp's study did seem to support the conclusion that Ohio libraries could have done better at selecting materials from both sides of the spectrum. But what of his finding that those libraries held more conservative than liberal monographs (specifically 1,211 copies of the conservative titles vs. 529 copies of the liberal)? The two lists he used to investigate the problem and which he published as appendices do not seem to be truly comparable. About half of the 37 titles on the conservative list, as Hupp acknowledges, were issued by small publishers. The other half were issued by “larger trade presses and university presses.” Yet all the titles on the left/liberal list were from small presses. And what he does not specify is that 14 of those 32 left/liberal titles were published in Great Britain, 12 by a single firm (Zed). So is it really surprising Ohio libraries would have more titles from the conservative than the left/liberal lis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• About the Editor
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Collection Evaluation and Acquisitions Budgets: A Kaleidoscope in the Making
• In Support of Collection Assessment: The Role of Automation in the Acquisitions and Serials Departments
• Serials Cancellation Projects: Necessary Evil or Collection Assessment Opportunity?
• Me and My Shadow: Vendors as the Third Hand in Collection Evaluation
• Collection Assessment and Acquisitions Budgets
• Management Data for Selection Decisions in Building Library Collections
• Locked in Conversation: The College Library Collection and the Pluralist Society
• Annual Survey of Serials Collection Assessment Programs, Practices, and Policies in Academic Libraries—1991–1992
• Appendix