Collection Analysis 17
Collection Analysis
Hagerty Library – Drexel University
Group:
Ionelia Engel, Cathleen Lu, Brian Stewart
Info 665-500
Prof. Catherine Collins
8/29/2010
Table of Contents
Information About the Library 3
Information About the Subject Areas Mapped 4
Internal Analysis of the Mapped Subject Areas 5
External Analysis of the Mapped Subject Areas 8
Group Strategies and Responsibilities 12
Bibliography 13
Appendix 14
Information about the Library
Drexel University is among the prestigious universities in the Philadelphia area, being ranked by U.S. News as number two for “Up-and-Coming Schools” in the nation. Nine colleges and three schools including arts and sciences, business, medicine, nursing, engineering, science and technology, law, as well as others are the core of the institution. Through its schools, Drexel offers 62 bachelors, 63 masters, and 35 doctoral programs. It has an enrollment of approximately 22,000 students[1] from 100 nations, and has more than 100,000 alumni worldwide. The university mission is to serve its students as well as society through comprehensive integrated academic offerings.[2]
The university’s libraries are dedicated to supporting Drexel’s mission, which emphasizes community initiatives, scholarly activities, and research. The libraries’ mission therefore is to meet the information needs of the Drexel community by providing services, instruction, technology, facilities, and collections. The collection consists of various formats, totaling a number of almost half a million books, periodicals, DVDs, videos, and archival materials.[3]
Hagerty Library collection development is related to the curriculum, and it supports the “current and future educational and research needs of faculty, staff, and students.” [4] The collection thus includes materials that depend upon the undergraduate programs offered, the highest degree awarded by the program, the number of students enrolled in a program, and scholarly activities and funded research. Librarians address the following main subject areas, each including one or more secondary areas: Business and Economics, Education, Engineering, Humanities and Social Sciences, Library and Information Science Technology, Media and Design Arts, and Sciences. The subject areas chosen to be mapped at this time are History, Business, and Women’s Studies as special emphasis.
Information About the Subject Areas Mapped
The two main subjects of History and Business were chosen primarily for their broad topical areas. History, in particular, like many other areas in the Humanities and Social Sciences, tends to be a staple of university general education requirements, so collections in the subject are often at least developed to a satisfactory extent. But history also allows for an extremely broad and nearly unlimited scope of topics within its discipline. As an educational institution known for its focus on science, technology, and engineering, Drexel is a perfect example of this. Hagerty Library’s research guides for History offer a number of general resources, but two additional guides focus on the History of Science and the History of Technology.[5] These guides feature resources and materials that simultaneously support the university’s science and technology curriculum as well as the subject area of history. It will be interesting to see how the internal analysis compares with an external analysis of an outside collection.
Business was chosen specifically with Drexel’s significant business curriculum in mind. Drexel’s LeBow College of Business has undergraduate, graduate and MBA, executive MBA, and doctorate programs, so it is expected that a considerable portion of Hagerty’s print and electronic materials will comprise of business titles.[6] Hagerty Library’s research guides on Business cover a range of topics from Business Articles, Etiquette, Plans and Entrepreneurship, to Economics, Marketing and Advertising, Companies, and Industries.[7]
Women’s Studies area was chosen as the special emphasis collection for analysis, based on Drexel Library’s Collection Development Policy where the subject was named as one of the areas of special study. Additionally, it was thought that Women’s Studies would be an area of comparable analysis against outside collections, and while special emphasis, would not be too specialized or divergent. Along with Hagerty’s materials, the collections from Drexel’s Archives are also significant, as they contain numerous holdings on women in medicine. The Archives is the repository for the records and heritage of Drexel’s College of Medicine, and two of its predecessor institutions were all-female medical schools, allowing for a unique “Women in Medicine” collection.[8] This collection is available for searching at the collection level through the Hagerty’s catalog.
Internal Analysis of the Mapped Subject Areas
For the purpose of this assignment, internal collection analysis should be primarily based on the results of a comparison between each of the three subject collections; history, business and women’s studies, and the mission/objectives of the Drexel library system. Similarly, internal analysis will also consider the needs of the user community. These needs, in the case of academic libraries, are directly related to needs of the curriculum followed by any given student. This is reflected by Hagerty Library’s collection development policy, which states that “high priority is placed on supporting the curriculum-related needs of the undergraduate and professional program students”[9].
Hagerty library maintains approximately 45,021 items under the broad LC subject term of ‘History’. Compared with a total student population of 22,493[10], this indicates an item/community ratio of approximately 2:1. This is significantly lower than the 15:1 ratio required by the ACRL Formula A[11], and drops further if 2,500 faculty members are added to the community size[12]. However, such formulae are intended to evaluate an entire collection, and are not indicative of subject-level effectiveness. Furthermore, only a fraction of the total population will follow a curriculum that utilizes this subject’s resources. Of the total subject items, approximately 50% are printed monographs. However, 35% of the collection is web resources, including electronic journals. Additionally, there are 282 video recordings in the history collection. This format diversity is a great strength of the collection, and is concordant with the “Mission Fulfillment” requirements of the Hagerty CDP[13]. Format diversity is a collection suggestion offered by the ACRL[14], as well as an important criterion for academic library evaluation[15]. Equally important is the currency of the collection, which is required to support the several graduate-level curriculums and research-level collections. To this end, approximately 19% of the collection was published in the last five years, and 34% within the last ten years. Overall, the history collection satisfies the needs of the library’s mission and community by providing a large volume of current multi-format materials. The only flaw of note is the relatively low ratio of materials to patrons, but this is mitigated by the facts that, in practice, academic library subject collections do not serve the entire library community.
Due to the nature of academic libraries, searching for the individual subject heading of “business” can be deceptive for evaluative purposes. Such a search returns only 988 items, an extremely low number. However, Hagerty’s curriculum-based collection development policy indicates that the ‘business’ collection is in fact an amalgam of no less than 30 individual subject headings, including advertising, finance, and economics[16]. Combined, these subjects equal a business collection of approximately 47,649 items, resulting in a similarly low ratio when compared to the total user community. However, the Hagerty CDP indicates that the primary audience for this collection is the LeBow College of Business. When compared to this community, some 746 students[17], the ratio is a staggering 63.9:1. Format diversity is equally strong, with a full 51% of the collection devoted to web resources and the inclusion of 108 microfilm items and 68 video recordings. 17.5% of the collection has been published within five years, and 32.7% in the last ten years, indicating currency of similar strength to the history collection. One weakness of note, however, is that only 40,520 items are published in English. A full 15% of the collection is therefore unsuited for the audience it seeks to serve.
The special emphasis collection used for this assignment, ‘women’s studies’[18], is supported by approximately 3,294 items listed under the subject heading of ‘women’. This collection is intended for a very specialized community, and is collected to support a ‘women’s studies’ minor, itself available only to International Area Studies majors. Though no hard data on this community is available, the aforementioned restrictions indicate a small community and a high ratio of items per patron. Despite the small collection size, format diversity is on par with larger collections, with 30.5% of the items listed as web resources. Also included are 45 video records, but only 31 journals and 2 microfilm items. The low number of AV and microfilm items, requirements of the Hagerty CDP, can be somewhat attributed to the specificity of the subject. Proportionately, the currency of this collection is superior to the two others considered; 21.7% has been published within five years, and 39% within ten years. In support of the minor’s multidisciplinary curriculum requirements, the collection is drawn from broader subjects, such as history, philosophy and social sciences. Of these, history is the most strongly represented, and includes 374 items. Overall, this is a strong collection in support of a small community. It effectively satisfies the library’s mission goals through multiple formats and currency, while satisfying its supported curriculum through quantity and subject diversity.
External Analysis of the Mapped Subject Areas
There are a few sets of data accessible for comparison on NCES Library Statistics Program website[19]. However, the data set of most interest to us, the ‘size of collection,’ is not available for Drexel Libraries. According to the ACRL Standards for Libraries in Higher Education,[20] other criteria on which a peer group can be chosen for comparison is either the institution’s mission or expenditure for library support. Again the data for the expenditure for library support is not available for Drexel through the NCES Library Statistics. Due to university’s emphasis on research, we decided to choose a library based on the Carnegie Classification code, which qualifies Drexel University as Doctoral/research–intensive. One such institution is Dartmouth College. Another reason for our decision to compare Dartmouth to Drexel is that this institution has a Business College in addition to its Arts and Sciences College. Their collection also has a special emphasis on Woman and Gender Studies.
We compared Drexel University’s characteristics to Dartmouth, by choosing seven options for the comparison. As a result, we retrieved all the data for Dartmouth, but only one set of data for Drexel. In order to do the analysis for this report, the matching data for Drexel had to be inserted manually in the table. Before proceeding to analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the two subject areas collections, history and business, and that of the special emphasis collection, women’s studies, it is worth noting that for the total collection there are 480 items per student at Dartmouth, while Drexel has only 24.64 items per student.
The number of ‘own items’ as listed in WorldCat is different than the number listed by the library’s OPAC. For this analysis, we will use the number listed in OPAC for the main library. The counterpart of the Hagerty Library at Dartmouth College is the Baker Berry Library, which maintains approximately 262,988 items for the ‘History’ LC subject term. This will give a ratio of approximately 44:1 items/population. This is significantly higher than the 2:1 ratio of items/population that the Hagerty Library maintains.
There are 14,514 items held at the Baker Berry Library for the ‘business’ subject heading. However, 34,584 additional items are housed at the Feldberg Business and Engineering Library. This gives a total of 49, 098 items, which gives a ratio of approximately 8:1 items/student. Similar to Drexel, this collection is mainly used by the population of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. With an enrollment of approximately 500, the ratio based on these statistics is almost 98:1, which is still much higher than what Drexel offers to their students. However, Drexel’s ratio of approximately 64:1 is still high.
Drexel Library’s collection development policy classifies the following call numbers as research levels for the business subject areas[21]:
HG 1-1500 Money and Finance
HG 1501-3701 Banking and Credit
HG 4001-9999 Business Finance, Investment, Securities, Stocks, Insurance
Also, in the history subject area the following call numbers are classified as study levels.
DA-DR European History Study
E History of the Americas Study
Based on these call numbers, a comparison was done between the two libraries following the technique developed by David Loertscher. The call numbers used for the below analysis do not represent the entire subject areas, as there are other levels included such as ‘basic’ or ‘minimal.’
Call numbers / Subjects / Levels / Drexel / DartmouthDA-DR / European History / Study / 5652 / 38549
E / History of the Americas / Study / 10000
(limited) / 27962
HG 1-1500 / Money and Finance / Research / 1533 / 2895
HG 1501-3701 / Banking and Credit / Research / 767 / 1379
HG 4001-9999 / Business Finance / Research / 3368 / 3548
Interdisciplinary / Women’s Studies / Special / 3294 / 2669
The five levels listed by the policy are, comprehensive, research, study, basic, and minimal. If we will have the 15 items/student as the comprehensive level, then we can divide the levels as following:
0-3 - Minimal
3.1-6 - Basic
6.1- 9 - Study
9.1-12- Research
12.1 - 15 Comprehensive
According to the above table, in the European History subject area, Dartmouth has a much higher ratio of 6.4:1 items/student than Drexel’s 0.25:1 items/student. Although this is not at research level, it is at study level, which is third after research according to the collection development policy. Dartmouth seems to meet the required level. However, Drexel’s collection in this area needs to be much improved.
For the ‘History of Americas’ area, we cannot do an accurate assessment because the searches are limited to 10,000 in Drexel’s OPAC, while in Dartmouth’s there are limited to 32,000. There is a ratio of 4.6:1 items/student for Dartmouth’s library, which is lower for a study level.
We will calculate the ratios for the business areas, using only the population of the Business schools. This will give a better comparison because the discrepancy between the numbers of students for the two schools is not very large, although LeBow College of Business also offers undergraduate programs. The ratios for Money and Finance are 2:1 items/student for LeBow, and 5.8:1 items/student for Tuck. Hagerty’s collection needs a more substantial improvement than LeBow. For ‘Banking and Credit’ the ratios are 1:1 items/student for LeBow, and 2.75:1 items/student for Tuck. Both schools have a low ratio for a research level, but Drexel’s is lower by a factor close to 3.