Editorial

311

To say that our print collections in large 
academic libraries are underutilized is, I 
am sorry to admit, an understatement.  
We have known this for some time. Thirty 
years ago Allen Kent released a seminal 
report, Use of Library Material: The Univer-
sity of Pittsburgh Study (New York: Marcel 
Dekker, 1979). Kent and his research team 
studied how the Pitt Library collection 
was used over a seven year period, 1969 
to 1975, and found to the shock of many 
people, particularly to some of the faculty 
at Pitt, that “any given book purchased 
had only slightly better than one chance 
in two of ever being borrowed” and that 
a small portion of the titles in the collec-
tion accounted for the majority of use. 
The Pitt faculty questioned Kent’s find-
ings and called for an investigation.  But 
subsequent research has confirmed the 
basic findings of the Pitt study: a large 
portion of the print books and journals 
in our research libraries receive little or 
no use. The annual statistics of the As-
sociation of Research Libraries over the 
last two decades show a steady decline 
in circulation transactions in our largest 
research libraries. Kent’s research showed 
a close correlation between external use 
of collections as measured by circulation 
transactions and in-house use of library 
material. 

As it happens, I was a graduate student 
in English literature and library science at 
the University of Pittsburgh during the 
time period of the Pitt Study, and I had 
Allen Kent as a teacher for one course 
in library automation, using punched 
sorting cards as I vaguely remember. 
Kent was excellent in the classroom, and 
his enthusiasm for library research was 
infectious. I thought I used the library col-
lection intensively at Pitt during my four 
years there –but obviously not enough to 

The Use of Library Material

influence the overall results 
of the infamous Pit Study!

What is an academic li-
brarian to do with such re-
search findings? Apparently, look away 
and not do much. In the years since the 
Pitt Study, not much has changed in how 
academic libraries, especially our larg-
est ones in the U.S., select and acquire 
print titles for their collections. Selection 
and acquisition are still done primarily 
based on publisher output and a local 
library perspective: we need our own 
copy of just about every scholarly work 
from reputable publishers regardless 
of their usefulness. Even an effective li-
brary consortium like OhioLINK, with a 
fast and efficient discovery and delivery 
system, has had little impact on the print 
acquisition habits of its member libraries. 
A recent study by OCLC (not yet pub-
lished) is uncovering steady duplication 
rates in the print monograph collections 
of OhioLINK members, while use rates 
continue to decline even below those re-
ported by Kent.  While great strides have 
been made in coordinating the acquisition 
of digital publications, print acquisitions 
and collection management have resisted 
modernization. 

Why is this? One explanation is that 
some librarians, scholars, and publishers 
believe that use should not be a factor in 
selecting titles for a library collection or 
in their longtime storage management. 
Use is an acceptable measure in a public 
library or a small academic library, but not 
in a large research library that collects the 
record of scholarship. Who knows when 
a book might be needed?  This perspec-
tive and practice make less and less sense 
today with advances in online union 
catalogs and indexing, content digitiza-
tion, and rapid document delivery. We can 



312 College & Research Libraries July 2009

fairly accurately measure use of existing 
collections, and we can even predict with 
some confidence the use of new books and 
journal articles. To ignore use and predict-
ed use are to ignore valuable management 
information that should influence our 
decisions about acquisitions practice and 
how we maintain our collections. If we are 
to really take serious our responsibility 
for collecting and preserving the record 
of scholarship, then we have to stop wast-
ing limited and valuable resources on all 
collecting and maintaining the same low 
or no use material. 

What can we do? To begin with, we 
should all stop acquiring the same low-
use or no-use books and journals. Under 
current practice they are too expensive 
to collect and maintain. Drive these pub-
lications (their authors and publishers) 
to new models for sharing their highly 
specialized scholarship; for example, 

move this kind of scholarship to digital 
publication through enlightened univer-
sity presses, disciplinary or institutional 
repository programs that are low cost, 
open access, and still maintain a rigor-
ous peer-review process. And looking at 
our legacy collections, we must develop 
shared print storage and service pro-
grams among libraries. There is no need 
for massive duplication of very low use 
material. Only through a coordinated 
collection management approach will we 
really protect the record of knowledge 
and at the same time end unnecessary 
massive duplication. 

We at College & Research Libraries wel-
come your research, case studies, and 
opinions about new techniques and best 
practices in the acquisition and manage 
of the record of scholarship as contained 
in our print collections. Let us not wait 
another thirty years for better ways. 

Joseph J. Branin
Editor, College & Research Libraries