Collections

Doll, Carol A. Quality and Elementary School Library Media Collections.

School Library Media Quarterly 25 no. 2 (Winter, 1997): 95-101.

Abstract : The article examines ways of evaluating media collections, including size; checking the collection against recognized standard bibliographies,; and calculating average collection age. There are difficulties with all of these methods. Size measures only quantity but says nothing about the content or condition of the items. Using a standard bibliography to evaluation collection depends on finding a suitable bibliography. It is difficult to demonstrate that the titles listed in a standard source do constitute a good collection of materials for the needs and characteristics of a particular library media center in a specific town and school. Also, many standard lists do not include items that are no longer available even thought these may be perfectly suitable for a collection. Another way of examining a collection is to estimate the age of information in the collection.
This can be done by selecting a random sample and computing the average or mean copyright date. This is a concise measurement but does not represent the totality of a diverse set of materials. Sometimes more than one figure is needed, as one for fiction and one for nonfiction titles. An examination of studies that have measured the average age of items in collections, shows that 20 years is the average figure for most collections. This compares poorly with curriculum change which occurs (in the state of Washington) approximately every six years. Weeding guidelines in the literature suggest that 5 or 10 years is the age at which titles should be examined for obsolescence. This does not compare favorably with the actual age of titles in school libraries. A 1994 survey of 1570 school library media centers, found that in the U.S. South and Northeast, libraries spend more on non-book resources than on books. According to another 1995 study, 46 percent of U.S. elementary schools are linked to the Internet, but only 9 percent of instructional rooms had such access. Even when Internet access is available it is neither practical nor desirable to neglect prin collections. Internet sites may be difficult to find and may provide inaccurate information.
Subject Category : Collections
Research Methods : Literature search
Language : English
Keywords : School Libraries; Evaluation
Identifier: Washington state, US

Kachel, Debra E. Improving Access to Periodicals: A Cooperative Collection Management Project.

School Library Media Quarterly 24 no. 2 (Winter, 1996): 93-103.

Abstract : The Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13 Library Consortium consists of sixty-six school libraries, one public library system with fifteen branches, one special library and one academic library. Because of increasing serial costs, decreasing budgets, and increasing demand for periodical articles, the Consortium is pursuing a cooperative periodical project. As part of this project a study of periodical usage was conducted over a two-year period at eight high school libraries, three combined junior-senior high libraries, three middle school libraries and the public library. Usage of current periodicals was excluded from the study because of problems with data collection. The study defined a core periodical as one which contributed to 75% of total usage.
High schools had an average of 45 core titles, combined schools 27, and middle schools 15. Time and Newsweek were the most requested periodicals at all school levels. On average, 83.9% of requests came from the most recent five years of publication, but for the core collection, findings suggest that back issues should be maintained for ten years. Factors found to influence periodical usage include indexing (titles indexed in computer indexes were used more frequently than those indexed in book indexes, and the listing of articles in date order promoted use of current issues), holdings (titles held in-house circulated more heavily than those which needed to be ordered), teacher requirements, leisure reading preferences, and circulation restrictions (patrons preferred back issues which could circulate over those which needed to be copied).
A total of 1,435 articles representing 370 titles were obtained by school libraries through interlibrary loan. One-third of the ILL titles were already owned by the requesting school library; requests for these titles were due to defacing and theft of periodical collections and discarding of back issues due to space restrictions. In 58% of incidents where a library used ILL for a title more than the recommended five times a year, it did not use the title at all in the other year of the study. This suggests that magazines should not be purchased based on one year of ILL data, for this data may be affected by special research done by one individual. The use of commercial document delivery services is currently being investigated as an alternative to ownership in some cases.
Subject Category : Collections
Research Methods : Data Analysis
Language : English
Keywords : School Libraries; Periodical Collections
Identifier: Ephrata, Pennsylvania, US