Assessing a Consortium for a Multidisciplinary Subject

Abstract

This paper reports on a study to assess the Orbis Cascade Alliance’s print collection for material supporting the Black experience. It covers descriptions of general methods used for collection assessment as well as those used to assess the Alliance including Brief Tests, List Checking, and Comparison Studies. Each method is described with its strengths and weaknesses as well as their application to a consortium of libraries with Black experience being the subject matter of the material collected. These methods can be used for other multidisciplinary topics. Issues with subject headings, publishing, acquisitions, and racism emerged during the study and are covered in the discussion.

Keywords:

• Academic consortium
• brief tests
• collection assessment
• comparison study
• list checking
• multidisciplinary assessment
• publication bias
• racism

Notes

1 The African-American Studies Core List of Resources could not be added to the Appendix as it is proprietary material; however, the book is easily acquired through Interlibrary Loan.

2 The issue of duplicate records can be addressed by exporting them to a citation manager to remove the duplicates, however, only ten records are exported at one time. With results in the thousands this is not a practical solution for this study. A telephone call (January 4, 2019) with the OCLC helpdesk confirmed that there was no other mechanism to remove duplicate records.

3 Though Lee & Low are publishers of children’s books a response to this author’s email inquiry (January 8, 2019) reported that the survey included adult and children’s publishing. Academic publishers were not included in the initial study. Lee & Low is currently conducting a second study that includes academic publishers as well as literary agencies.