Rather than face the prospect of trying to assess the quality of every resource in the collection, one can focus instead on the "core" literature for the field. There are several methods for measuring core collections. One is to simply describe the strength of the reference collection by checking the library's holdings against the list of reference works in the definitive, well-established ALA's Guide to Reference . For example, the Department of Communication Studies may be very interested to learn that of the 285 definitive reference works listed by the Guide, the library held 94%, yet only 70% of the bibliographies. (This data is fictional.) Note, too, that the Guide includes lists relevant to interdisciplinary studies, which is beneficial because such lists can be difficult to find. The new online edition of the Guide greatly improves the efficiency of this work as an assessment tool.

The web pages of library organizations, such as sections of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), keep up-to-date core lists. There is, for example, a set of core lists of monographs provided by the Collection Development Committee of the Women's Studies Section of ACRL. The Gender Studies department might be interested in knowing that the library has a solid collection of 395 of the 412 core monographs in Women's Studies. (This data is fictional.) Not only does the quality of the collection sound impressive, this finding creates an opportunity to encourage funding for the missing four percent.

Data & Methods Bank