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6 College & Research Libraries December 2004

 
 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 
 
 

 

 
 

 
 

 

 

Letters 

LeLetttters to the Editorers to the Editor 
This letter is in response to the article, 

“Assessing Collection Usefulness: An 
investigation of library ownership of the 
resources graduate students use”, by 
Erin T. Smith, C&RL v64, n5, p.344-355 
(Sept. 2003). 

The author used a citation analysis ap-
proach to evaluate University of Georgia 
Libraries collection. In the study, thirty 
masters theses and PhD dissertations 
were sampled from 1991 and 2001. Of 
these thirty, 7 represented the arts and 
humanities, 6 for education, 10 for the sci-
ences and 7 for the social sciences. (p.346) 

The methodology used by the author 
was to analyze few graduate publications 
in great detail instead of analyzing many 
graduate publications in lesser detail. 
This is a valid methodology if the focus 
of analysis is on identifying differences 
in individual graduate publications – it is 
not an accurate methodology for evalu-
ating an entire library’s collection or for 
justifying collection policies. 

For example, the author makes claims 
about increased ownership of materi-
als in education and the social sciences, 

and a decrease for the arts & 
humanities and the sciences. 
These differences, however, 
were accountable by a very 
small number of citations, which may 
have been explained entirely by a single 
bibliography in each of the subjects. In 
addition, the author makes these claims 
without a statistical test. If the standard 
Student’s t-test were used, the results 
would most likely have indicated no 
significant difference. 

Few ARL library budgets have been 
able to keep up with the rate of price 
inflation for materials resulting in fewer 
purchased periodicals and monographs 
(ARL, 2001). Justifying current collec-
tion policies with this data may have 
unintended political and budgetary con-
sequences. As the popular proverb goes, 
“Be careful for what you ask for, you may 
just get it.” 

Philip M. Davis 
Life Sciences Librarian 

Cornell University Library 

Notes: 

ARL. (2001). Mongograph and Serial Costs in ARL Libraries, 1986-2001 (Graph 2). ARL Sta-
tistics 2000-01. 

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Letters to the Editor 7 

Response from Erin Smith:
 
The above Letter to the Editor questions 
the appropriateness of the methodology 
for evaluating collection usefulness. Un-
deniably, the research would be improved 
by a larger sample and examining the 
works in “lesser detail” would be a means 
of increasing the number of publications 
without dramatically increasing the time 
involved in conducting the research. Sta-
tistical tests were not employed simply 
because the sample was so small and be-
cause, as the letter quite correctly points 
out, the differences over time were not 
significant in most cases. 

However, it should be noted that this 
project never intended to provide the 

definitive answer to the monograph-pe-
riodical question, nor were the resulting 
findings used as the overriding factor 
in the Libraries’ allocation decisions. 
Rather, this research was undertaken in 
order to determine if quantitative data 
on the usefulness of a library’s collection 
could be gathered by analyzing the bib-
liographies of theses and dissertations. 
To that end, the goal was not so much 
to draw conclusions but to develop a 
methodology that can be employed in 
any library that supports a graduate 
school and can be readily expanded to 
address the statistical concerns raised 
above. 

Erin T. Smith 
Cataloging and Systems Librarian 

Westminster College