Citations and Circulation Counts: Data Sources for Monograph Deselection in Research Library Collections

Bruce White
2017 College and Research Libraries  
Bruce White, Attribution-NonCommercial (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) CC BY-NC. Studies of data-driven deselection overwhelmingly emphasise the importance of circulation counts and date-of-last-use in the weeding process. When applied to research collections, however, this approach fails to take account of highly influential and significant titles that have not been of interest to large numbers of borrowers but that have been highly cited in the literature. It also assumes
more » ... past borrowing activity is a reliable indicator of future usage. This study examines the correlations between past and future usage and between borrowing and citation of monographs and concludes that both data elements should be used when deselecting research monographs. niversity libraries in the second decade of the twenty-first century find themselves facing a number of critical challenges as they negotiate changing environmental demands, new technologies that complicate their mission as much as they facilitate it, and an ongoing struggle to maintain their relevance and centrality within their host institutions. The teaching-research nexus remains at the core of what universities do; consequently, library collections need to meet the needs of a wide range of constituents, from first-degree students through postgraduate and doctoral students to world-class researchers working at the very highest level. Library collections aim to satisfy the information demands of all of these groups through the purchase of large journal packages, through extensive monograph collections at all levels, and through the provision of support facilities and services geared to their common need to access, manage, and use the best and most appropriate information. This study will look at how this complex set of demands is played out in one particular sphere, the decision process around deselecting dated print monographs or relegating them to storage collections to maintain current collections of high-value items for the support of teaching and research. Libraries of all kinds periodically remove books from their shelves and dispose of them or move them into "just in case" storage collections, and this is as true of university libraries as it is of other types. The drivers of this activity are the need to conserve building space as new acquisitions fill existing shelves to capacity, 1 the
doi:10.5860/crl.78.1.53 fatcat:onl24apoanfipld5vppmbsk2uq