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DataBank: Qualitative Methods

Storytelling - Narrative

Assessment should not just be numbers. Descriptions of manuscripts and archives, e-books, videos, multimedia, digital archives, sound recordings, microform sets, and others help provide a broader, richer, and truer picture of the collection.

It used to be that most collections consisted of printed books and journals, and maybe some microforms. These were easy to count. It is more difficult today, and not only because the variety of formats has increased. Aggregator databases of full-text journals, partial full-text, and abstracts only, and e-book collections make counting books and journals less simple than in the past. It is ironic, then, that as data-driven decision-making and assessment become more prominent, and assessment tools more numerous, the need for qualitative analysis has grown.

Even the most sophisticated collection assessment tools will leave out information about collections. In the case of large academic libraries, in particular, there are often many older, unique works whose records have not migrated to WorldCat. Most libraries also have backlogs and “hidden collections” of un-cataloged materials. In addition, there are major microform sets that contain large collections of monographs whose individual titles may not appear in the local catalog. The same holds for some e-book collections. It may be impossible to quantify the number of full-text monographs in these collections; it is important to acknowledge their existence and relevance to the subject under analysis.

Whether or not a format can be quantified, narrative helps identify the relevance and significance of resources. For example, in addition to reporting that the history collection includes 150 microfilm sets, funding agencies, the department and others will be interested in knowing that most of those sets are related to U.S. nineteenth century newspapers, that the library has purposely focused collection building on this material. Narrative is also a convenient method of communicating the importance of e-collections (e.g., a digital archive related to the French Revolution) that are sometimes difficult to quantitatively measure or that simply need to be fully described.

Finally, statistics alone can be misleading. In the case of highly interdisciplinary subjects or ones which have no historical classification range per se, a statistical analysis of collection size alone distorts the reality of subject support. For example, an analysis of the women's studies collection that only provides counts within the Library of Congress classification 305s would greatly underestimate and under-represent works related to this subject. It would be important to note, in the narrative story of the collection, that works related to women's studies are also found within the broader classifications of history, political science, literature, and almost all other humanities and social sciences; and it would add depth to such a study to also mention the Femina Collection within the Special Collections division of the library.