Collection Assessment?

[rudy]

I was chatting with Judy H over email, and we were talking about
assessing collections as a whole (or, in smaller chunks of the whole)
and she mentioned an ILS report they use at their library. Is anyone
else doing collection assessment with something other than the
WorldCat tool? What do you use? How well does it work for you?

Judy's email:
SCAT tables are part of the Innovative Interfaces system. It’s a way
create spreadsheets (item, bib) on a regular update by date of
publication and discrete call# ranges (TR 848: Cinematography –
History; TR 849 Cinematography -- Biography) for the purpose of
tracking holdings. It’s not whether something is “too old,” but
whether a particular call# range has enough current materials to
support the curriculum. If your institution has a nutrition program
and more than 50% of your books in TX341-641 are more than 25 yrs.
old, it’s time to look closely at that collection. So rather than
randomly paw through the stacks, we’re examining those ranges that
seem out-of-whack with the needs of the curriculum. The food pyramid
had morphed considerably over those 25 years. We too struggle with
weeding. And there is no firm line. When we have selected items for
potential weed, our cataloging staff posts those titles (arranged by
call#) on our library web page and librarians notify their liaison
faculty. If a member of the teaching faculty does not want a title
weeded, we return it to the shelves (and put a note in the item
record: “retain per” name and date.

Judy

[Collection Development]

Portland Community College has found that analysis by using
Millenium's SCAT table is problematic. Last time I tried to run the
canned report, it said that over half of our items had no call number.
The support Innovative gave was "you have to be very careful when you
set up your SCAT tables. See if you made a mistake." So I have
started downloading use and age information to EXCEL, and do my own
reports. It is a slower process, but the information is more reliable.
The system I use is laid out in a book I co-wrote with Bob Cooper,
"Analyzing Library Collection Use with Excel" (ALA Editions, 2007)
That book was written for Excel 2003, and the changes of Excel 2007
have made some things easier, but the basic frame work is still useful
to me.

Tony Greiner

[Alexis]

Right now, we are using a combination of circulation and age
information from our ILS. I used WorldCat Coolection Analysis in my
previous job and found flaws, but at the last Charleston Conference it
look liked they'd made improvements. Another tool I've looked closely
at is Library Dynamics.

Alexis

[Patricia Reese]

I had failed to check my G-mail and am finding lots of interesting conversations. The one person I talked too didn't know how to use the SCAT tables so I have been using  the Cooper and Greiner book and creating subject reports in Millenium and transferring to EXCEL it is a very time consuming process but I am new to this and it seems to be working.
Pat Reese

[Collection Development]

Hi Patricia.

I'm sorry that the process is time-consuming. I'm not familiar with
Millenium Subject reports, and use the "Create List" function in order
to generate the raw data. It isn't exactly easy, but it might be
easier than Subject reports. There are instructions on how to use
"create list" on the wiki for our book.

http://excelbook.pbworks.com/

By the end of the month, I hope to have directions on time-saving
steps for people who use Excel 2007 as well.

One of the problems with the SCAT reports is that they have limited
customizability. For example, they show how many items were published
in each decade, but if it is 2009, knowing that you have x number of
titles published since 2000 isn't so useful.

Feel free to contact me directly if you have questions about our
system.

Tony Greiner. tony_g...@hotmail.com

> > Judy- Hide quoted text -
>
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[ppettijohn]

I am combining and reconstituting methods from:
White, Howard D. Brief Tests of Collection Strength: a methodology for
all types of libraries, 1995 Greenwood.
White, Howard D. "Better than Brief Tests: Coverage Tests of
Collection Strength" CRL, March 2008 69(2), 155-74.
Beals, J.B. and Ron Gilmour “Assessing collections using brief tests
and WorldCat Collection Analysis,” Collection Building, 26-4 (2007),
104-107.
Greiner and Cooper, Analyzing library collection use with Excel, ALA,
2007 (great on the excel and statistics end.)

I can export into Excel from both OCLC Assessment tool, and my system
(and get different enough results to cause confusion all around).
I use item and bibliographic title counts without circulation
information from OCLC and my system, by call number range, which I
combine with:
the American Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)
quantitative Formula A for colleges, used prior to the 2004 revision;
and the newer, less quantitative June 2004 Standards
http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlstandards/standardslibraries.cfm

This allows me to analyze the collection in comparison to my FTE
faculty and students, undergraduate majors and minors; numbers of
graduate programs, etc. compared to my holdings in call number
ranges. I create inter- and cross-disciplinary call number range
groups for many disciplines, using a modified WLN Conspectus approach,
creating Collection Level Ratings and CLR goals.

Once I have established the CLR's and CLR goals, I look at the age of
the collection, overlap and uniqueness of the collection, compared to
libraries within my regional university system, within my state
university system, and within a regional group where I have identified
peer and aspirants. This is not the same as the assessment where you
make a request to an identified peer institution, but a quick
assessment within a consortial group where we already share OCLC
collection assessment information with eachother.
The last thing I look at is circulation within the call number ranges,
and it usually dovetails perfectly with the size, currency, and
quality of the collection, combined with the level of need based on
FTE, etc. Like a lot of folks, I think I am experimenting with tools,
and trying to imagine the most meaningful inputs and output measures.
I have looked at ILL to identify subjects frquently requested.

The most useful and inspiring appraoches to using OCLC CA to compare
and assess collections both by discrete discipline and overall
strengths and weaknesses that I have found are those of Anna Perrault,
some available on OCLC, others linked on her website under research
reports http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~perrault/

On Aug 13, 6:18 pm, Collection Development <anthony.grei...@pcc.edu>
wrote:

> Hi Patricia.
>
> I'm sorry that the process is time-consuming. I'm not familiar with
> Millenium Subject reports, and use the "Create List" function in order
> to generate the raw data. It isn't exactly easy, but it might be
> easier than Subject reports. There are instructions on how to use
> "create list" on the wiki for our book.
>
> http://excelbook.pbworks.com/
>
> By the end of the month, I hope to have directions on time-saving
> steps for people who use Excel 2007 as well.
>
> One of the problems with the SCAT reports is that they have limited
> customizability. For example, they show how many items were published
> in each decade, but if it is 2009, knowing that you have x number of
> titles published since 2000 isn't so useful.
>
> Feel free to contact me directly if you have questions about our
> system.
>

> Tony Greiner.  tony_grei...@hotmail.com

> > - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -