College and Research Libraries


50th Anniversary Feature-

''Quantitative Criteria 
for Adequacy of 

Academic Library Collections 11 : 
A Reprint of a C&RL Classic 

In the 1930s the regional accrediting asso-
ciations gave up trying to determine the 
minimum number of volumes an aca-
demic library should have on its shelves 
before its parent institution would be ac-
creditable. While most academic librarians 
agreed with the associations' new-found 
principle that "an institution's resources 
must be judged in terms of its program,'' 
this guideline proved difficult for most of 
us to use in our day-to-day collection de-
velopment work. Surely, we felt, there 
must be some number of volumes below 
which a college library collection would be 
unarguably of insufficient size. Planners 
moreover pressed us for hard numbers 
that could be used for budgetary purposes 
and for long-range institutional develop-
ment. If we librarians would not (or could 
not) provide them, we were assured, insti-
tutional planners would develop them for 
themselves. Yet we librarians had diffi-
culty finding consensus among us as to 
what an appropriate number of volumes 
would be for a library. 

In the years before and after World War 
II we did at least begin to build lists of 
books that we felt should be found in al-
most any college collection. That experi-
ence led us in 1959 to adopt in ACRL' s first 
set of college library standards the figure 
of 50,000 as the minimum number of vol-
umes that every college library should 
own. Almost immediately, however, we 
were dissatisfied with that figure as well, 
not because we felt it was in the wrong 
''ballpark,'' but rather primarily because 
it obviously did not take individual insti-

tutional uniquenesses into account. Also, 
it was too "round." "Why 50,000?" we 
asked. "Why not 49,624?" Or almost any 
other number of that approximate magni-
tude? 

In 1964 Verner W. Clapp and Robert T. 
Jordan were retained to advise authorities 
on the growth needs of state-supported 
academic libraries in the State of Ohio. In 
their effort to find hard numbers while still 
taking into account legitimate institutional 
diversities, they produced a concept that 
has subsequently come to bear their 
names as the "Clapp/Jordan Formula." A 
paper reporting their deliberations was 
published in CRL in 1965, and for a quarter 
of a century that paper has played a semi-
nal role in our thinking regarding quanti-
tative standards for academic libraries. 

The original piece by Messrs. Clapp and 
Jordan, which appeared in the September 
1965 issue of College & Research Libraries, is 
now reprinted here, incorporating the cor-
rigenda published in the January 1966 is-
sue, page 72. Persons who have not previ-
ously read it, or others who have forgotten 
it, may be surprised to find that the au-
thors' deliberations extended far beyond a 
simple volume count. It is probably just as 
well that some of their further thoughts 
have been forgotten, but there may also be 
some overlooked considerations in this 
piece that could once again be usefully 
raised. In any case this paper should be re-
membered as a landmark contribution to 
the literature of academic librarianship.-
David Kaser. 

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