[Eril-l] funding for DDA/PDA

[Rick Anderson]

But enrollment is not the only other factor that could reasonably effect circulation.  There are demographic and cultural factors that could be at work.

Agreed. The enrollment data were not taken into account in order to explain circ declines (which would be counterintuitive anyway, since enrollment has been rising while circ has been declining) but rather to give more nuance to the raw circ figures. Knowing the trend in number of circs is good and important, but so is knowing the trend in circs per student.

To jump from lower circulation figures to the conclusion that poor selection decisions have been made is problematic.

Sure, and I would argue that the issue is actually even more complicated than that. “Good” or “bad” selection decisions are defined based on what you’re trying to do when you select books. If what you want to do is build a great collection according to some set of predetermined criteria of collection quality, then you’ll judge selection decisions according to those criteria. If you want to build a collection that gets used by patrons at a high rate, then you’ll judge selection decisions based mainly on resulting circulation and in-house use—which is itself a pretty complicated proposition. In reality, most of us assess our collections using some blend of those two factors, maybe with others thrown in as well.

Ultimately, it seems to me that the questions each of us ought to be asking are, first, “What does my institution need the library collection to do?,” and second, “How can we figure out whether our collection is doing it?”

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Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication
Marriott Library, University of Utah
Desk: (801) 587-9989
Cell: (801) 721-1687
rick.anderson at utah.edu
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