Along with data on "core" expenditures, the "core" literature of any field can be measured. The concept of core collections is a good analysis technique to use when you wish to assess interdisciplinary subjects. If relevant literature on the subject is scattered throughout LC or Dewey classifications, it may be necessary and useful to refer to that which is countable as "core." You can then move forward and describe related collections as "supplemental" or "supportive." For example, the whole of Women's Studies is not contained within a discreet set of call numbers, but the small range that is assigned to it can be referred to as the "core." To capture more, sections of the call number range for Sociology could be counted and described as "supportive" of Women's Studies.

There are several methods for measuring core collections. One is to simply describe the strength of the reference collections by checking the library's holdings against the list of reference works in the definitive, well-established ALA's Guide to Reference. For example, although this may not sound exciting, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese 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 web pages of some Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) sections and other library organizations 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.

Collection assessment is not only numbers and statistics, but also the narrative story of collections. For a highly interdisciplinary subject or one which has no historical classification range per se, an analysis of collection size alone could be misleading. 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.

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 which often contain large collections of monographs whose individual titles may not appear in the local catalog. The same holds for some e-book collections. Although it may be difficult to quantify the number of full-text monographs in these collections, it is important to acknowledge their relevance to the subject under analysis.

Assessment should not be just numbers. Descriptions of manuscripts and archives, e-books, and microform sets will help provide a broader, richer, and truer picture of the collection.

Data & Methods Bank