Managing and Analyzing Your Collection: A Practical Guide for Small Libraries and School Media Centers (Ala Editions)

If you can follow a cookbook, you can use these simple "recipes" - calculations, formulas, and measurements - to come up with statistics for analysis and management of your collection. Using measures of timeliness, relevancy, use percentages, user profiles, and comparisons, you can determine in quantitative ways the quality of your library's collection. From there, you can communicate its value to your customers and that's the name of the game!
These time-tested, step-by-step directions show even the most math-phobic how to: gather and analyze data produced by automated systems; conduct a random sampling using one of three easy-to-execute methods; evaluate all types of information formats including books, videos, periodicals, and CD-ROMs; provide hard evidence to decision makers; improve collections with smart weeding to make way for new acquisitions; and estimate the cost of updating your collection.

Carol A. Doll is a professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Wayne State University in Detroit. She is co-author of Bibliotherapy with Young People and has contributed to numerous journals including School Library Media Quarterly and the Journal of Youth Services in Libraries. As an active member of AASL, she is currently the AASL representative to the National Committee for Accrediting Teacher Education. Doll received her doctorate from the University of Illinois, Urbana. Pamela Petrick Barron is associate professor in the department of Library and Information Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. The content and research supervisor for "Jump Over the Moon: Sharing Literature with Young Children," an award-winning, fifteen-part telecourse currently in use in the United States, Canada, and Europe, she is also the author of Writers on Writing for Young Adults. An active member of AASL and ALSC, she has served as a member of the 1990 Caldecott Committee, the 1996 Newbery Award Committee, and the 2001 Notable Video Committee. Barron received her doctorate from Florida State University.