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192 College & Research Libraries December 2004

 
  

 
 
 
 

 
 

 
 
 

 

 
 
 

 
 

 
 
 

 

 
 

 

 

 

  

 
 

 

 
 

 
 

   

Letters to the Editor
 
This letter is in response to the article, 

“Assessing Collection Usefulness: An 
investigation of library ownership of the 
resources graduate students use”, by 
Erin T. Smith, C&RL v64, n5, p.344-355 
(Sept 2003). 

The author used a citation analysis ap-
proach to evaluate University of Georgia 
Libraries collection. In the study, thirty 
masters theses and PhD dissertations were 
sampled from 1991 and 2001. Of these 
thirty, 7 represented the arts and humani-
ties, 6 for education, 10 for the sciences 
and 7 for the social sciences. (p.346) 

The methodology used by the author 
was to analyze few graduate publications 
in great detail instead of analyzing many 
graduate publications in lesser detail. 
This is a valid methodology if the focus 
of analysis is on identifying differences 
in individual graduate publications – it is 
not an accurate methodology for evalu-
ating an entire library’s collection or for 
justifying collection policies. 

For example, the author makes claims 
about increased ownership of materials 
in education and the social sciences, and 
a decrease for the arts & humanities and 

the sciences. These differences, 
however, were accountable by 
a very small number of cita-
tions, which may have been 
explained entirely by a single 
bibliography in each of the sub-
jects. In addition, the author 
makes these claims without a 
statistical test. If the standard Student’s 
t-test were used, the results would most 
likely have indicated no signifi cant dif-
ference. 

Few ARL library budgets have been 
able to keep up with the rate of price 
inflation for materials resulting in fewer 
purchased periodicals and monographs1. 
Justifying current collection policies with 
this data may have unintended political 
and budgetary consequences. As the 
popular proverb goes, “Be careful for 
what you ask for, you may just get it.” 

Philip M. Davis 
Life Sciences Librarian 

Cornell University Library 

1. ARL. (2001). Mongograph and Serial 
Costs in ARL Libraries, 1986-2001 (Graph 2). 
ARL Statistics 2000-01. 

The above Letter to the Editor questions 
the appropriateness of the methodology 
for evaluating collection usefulness. Un-
deniably, the research would be improved 
by a larger sample and examining the 
works in “lesser detail” would be a means 
of increasing the number of publications 
without dramatically increasing the time 
involved in conducting the research. Sta-
tistical tests were not employed simply 
because the sample was so small and be-
cause, as the letter quite correctly points 
out, the differences over time were not 
significant in most cases. 

However, it should be noted that this 
project never intended to provide the 
definitive answer to the monograph-pe-

riodical question, nor were the resulting 
findings used as the overriding factor 
in the Libraries’ allocation decisions. 
Rather, this research was undertaken in 
order to determine if quantitative data 
on the usefulness of a library’s collection 
could be gathered by analyzing the bib-
liographies of theses and dissertations. 
To that end, the goal was not so much to 
draw conclusions but to develop a meth-
odology that can be employed in any 
library that supports a graduate school 
and can be readily expanded to address 
the statistical concerns raised above. 

Erin T. Smith 
Cataloging and Systems Librarian 

Westminster College 

192