Book Availability: Academic Library Assessment

The assessment and analysis of materials availability

“…Ciliberti, et al (1987), for example, added a 'Bibliographic' failure to capture the possibility that clients were starting from incorrect citations, and also extended the model to cater for subject searches rather than searches for known items, by including branches for 'Matched Query' errors, resulting from a client failing to find the appropriate catalogue thesaurus term for the search they had in mind, and 'Appropriate Title' errors, which occur when users find items matching their search, but they have already read them, or the items are in the wrong language, at the wrong audience level or otherwise unsuitable. The Cilberti approach was later applied by Mitchell et al (1994). Other studies, including Harris and Garner (1992), extended the Kantor method to explore the availability of serials as well as books.…”

The evaluation and improvement of book availability in an academic library

“…Following the work of Frohmberg, Kantor and Moffett 20 and Mitchell, Radford and Hegg, 21 it was decided to undertake a longitudinal study of book availability, consisting of a large-scale initial survey, followed by any changes in library policy and practice revealed to be relevant, and completed by a follow up survey to assess the impact of the changes made. Clearly the changes in the library made as a result of the first survey would not necessarily be the only differences measured by the second survey, so that care had to be taken in interpreting the figures.…”

Book Availability Revisited: Turnaround Time for Recalls versus Interlibrary Loans

“…17 Eugene S. Mitchell and others repeated the study at WPCL in 1989, after implementing recom mendations aimed specifically at remedy ing circulation, patron, and selection er rors (for example, improving signs, pur chasing duplicate copies of high-demand books, and enhancing bibliographic in struction). 18 Overall book availability in creased to 64 percent, although 22 percent of the failures still resulted from titles being on loan.…”