Highlights

Recently Library Services was the recipient of the 2023 Educational Foundation Mini-Grant Award. The grant funding enables us to perform a large-scale collection analysis of the Library’s print book collection. Using robust collection analytical software we will analyze our print collection against authoritative lists through the industry standard Resources for College Libraries Plus platform. This resource includes comprehensive lists both for traditional college libraries and career specific programs. In recent years, Resources for College Libraries Plus has grown its list of emerging scholars to allow for a more diverse and inclusive library collection. With the aid of these tools, we aim to efficiently improve our collection for the academic needs of incoming students and ensure it offers a diverse representation of authors, topics, and subject matter. We also will compare our collection against peer and aspirant institutions to ensure our collection is representative of these institutions. Finally, this project will inform us of current pricing information and other relevant data as we identify the titles we should add to the collection.

Once we have this comparison information we can move forward with deselecting titles that no longer meet the needs of our students and do not support the curricular needs of the institution. Using the tools within this product, we can develop a plan to purchase the necessary titles to create a strong print collection- one that ensures the authors, publishers, and topics covered are reflective of our student population and their research needs.