Editorial

Evidence Summary Theme: Collections

Fiona Inglis
Associate Editor (Evidence Summaries)
Librarian, Health Sciences & Wellness
Humber College Libraries
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Email: fiona.inglis@humber.ca

2022 Inglis. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons‐Attribution‐Noncommercial‐Share Alike License 4.0 International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the same or similar license to this one.

DOI: 10.18438/eblip30237

The Evidence Summaries in this issue all focus on the domain of collections. Koufogiannakis et al. (2004) define this domain as “building a high-quality collection of print and electronic materials that is useful, cost-effective and meets the users’ needs” (p. 233).

The sudden need for more robust remote services over the past few years means that many libraries shifted their collections to prioritize access to electronic books and journals rather than print materials. In this issue, Shen looks at a study on the student perspective on digital resources and Patterson provides an appraisal of a study on changing print book usage at an academic library.

There is also an increased awareness of the care that libraries need to take with the cultural heritage materials that are entrusted to them. Bussell explores a study about the impact of digitized Indigenous knowledge collections on knowledge transmission and cultural identity.

Many libraries are looking at ways to audit their collections to ensure that they reflect the communities that they serve and that a diverse range of voices are included. Prince looks at an example from the field of architecture, which employs a novel approach to answering this question.

Finally, as we work to build collections that are relevant to our users, it is always interesting to find out more about what they say they need. Bridgeman explores a study on the role that unfulfilled requests can play in collection development.

We hope that you enjoy reading these Evidence Summaries and that they provide both inspiration and support for your own evidence based collections work.

References

Koufogiannakis, D., Slater, L., & Crumley, E. (2004). A Content Analysis of Librarianship Research. Journal of Information Science, 30(3), 227–239. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551504044668