National Library of Australia


Travails of a Conspectus Officer

Abstract: The paper outlines the experiences of the author as Conspectus Officer at the University of Melbourne Library for a six month period during 1995. It outlines the activities undertaken during the evaluation of the first discipline and the recognised benefits deriving from a thorough conspectus evaluation.

Shirley Sullivan, Collection Management Librarian (Physical Sciences), University of Melbourne for Australian Academic and Research Libraries (AARL).


Introduction

In June 1995 I was appointed Conspectus Officer of the University of Melbourne Library, with the brief to complete as much as possible of the evaluation of the collections of the Physical Sciences Division in the following 6 months.

I had read about Conspectus with interest some years back, after the flurry of activity and publication succeeding the visit of Paul Mosher to Australia in 1988. My reading included the final report of the Task Force on Conspectus published by ACLIS in late 19891, and I had nodded approvingly to myself that this was a "Good Thing", but this was as far as my involvement went. Busy connecting a small special library to the Internet and revamping client services, I put off further consideration of the role of Conspectus in academic libraries sine die.

This sin of omission was now catching up with me. Feeling decidedly ill-equipped for my new task, I nosedived into the literature, re-reading literature already perused around 1989-1991, and catching up with the material published subsequently, mainly Australian, but including some reading from North America and the UK. I read it with a focused attention lacking in my earlier reading. I studied philosophical arguments for and against, and more practical articles on how various libraries had gone about the task and what they has achieved. I acquired a copy of the Australian Conspectus Manual.2 This became my constant companion - my Baedeker to travels in the foreign land of conspectus. I chased up the Conspectus software and installed it, and attended a short training session on use of the software organised by the National Library.

What is Conspectus?

The term 'Conspectus' was adopted by the Research Libraries Group (RLG) in the United States to refer to a standardised means of describing library collections and to a database of such collection descriptions. They developed this in the 1970s and 1980s. Australia adopted it in 1989 and "Australianised" it. The development, of course, arose out of the increasing recognition that no library can possibly supply all the wants of its clientele and the need to begin collecting cooperatively to ensure the best coverage possible within a group of libraries.

The Australian Conspectus provides an evaluative framework for libraries to describe their collection strengths and collecting intentions and inform other libraries. The evaluation levels indicate the appropriateness of the collection to support certain subjects at certain levels, so they have immediate relevance for collection management at the institution level, for example, if you have a level 3 collection but the academics are running strong research programmes, you'd better improve that area of the collection.

Conspectus uses a Collecting Level Indicator (0-5), or summary, of a library's Current Collecting Level (CL); Acquisition Commitment (AC), and Collecting Goal (GL). Libraries can also supply additional information about strong collections, notable items in the collection, number and median age of items held, and the selection policy for a particular part of the collection.

The levels are:

Techniques

Feeling fortified by my reading and the secure possession of an increasingly battered conspectus manual, I embarked upon my first evaluation, that of the earth science collections. These had formed part of an earlier survey into geoscience collections in Victoria published by AACOBS in 19823. While obviously not undertaken using the Conspectus methodology, the report formed a useful background to my project.

I proposed using shelf-scanning, list-checking and interviews with academic staff as my evaluative techniques. A necessary preliminary was to gain at least a rough and ready understanding of the disciplines covered by the term "earth sciences". This I achieved by a study of the handbooks and research reports of the School of Earth Sciences, and by reading the extremely helpful title in the Bowker-Saur Guides to Information Sources series, Information Sources in the Earth Sciences. Its detailed explanations of the disciplines and their information requirements were extremely informative. To gain an Australian focus I followed this up with the study entitled, Towards 2005 : a Prospectus for Research and Research Training in the Australian Earth Sciences, prepared by a working party for the Australian Geoscience Council and published in 1992.

Having acquainted myself with the nature of the discipline, I embarked upon the shelf-checking and list checking concurrently with arranging interviews with academic staff as they emerged from caves and other hiding places during the mid-year non-teaching period.

As the "good book" says, the sorts of questions to keep in your mind when you are doing a conspectus evaluation are the following:

As you can see, in order to reliably answer many of these questions, you have to be familiar not only with the nature of the discipline and its information needs but also its publishing output.

Shelf Scanning

Keeping these sorts of questions in my mind, I began the first conspectus by looking at the shelves in the DDC areas in the Baillieu. The Baillieu is the main undergraduate library, comprising chiefly the social sciences and humanities collections, but including undergraduate level collections in the sciences. I saw it as a manageable collection to provide me with a reasonable trial run for my first shelf-scanning exercise. After I had checked a couple of bays, I realised that my recording procedures were too cumbersome, and I devised a draft recording worksheet, based on one found in the Conspectus Manual, which I subsequently further amended after using for a bit. On these sheets I recorded the name of the library I was "conspecting" (there are 19 libraries on campus), the DDC number and the number of shelves each DDC number occupied.

It was at this stage that I thought through who the ultimate recipients of the completed conspectus report would be, and what they might find interesting and useful information. These included such diverse groups as the branch librarians and collection management librarians, as well as the University Librarian and the Library Committee on campus, and the National Library's Distributed National Collection Office and other academic libraries beyond the campus. These groups were kept at the back of my mind as I conducted the shelf-scan. Accordingly, I noted whether the items were heavily borrowed or not, their physical condition, any languages other than English present, and anything else that struck me as useful to know for later activities, such as items needing relocation to the Rare Books Room, or items requiring repair or weeding. I also noted such things as a facsimile edition of a rare work, or a notable gift to the University Library.

Like all aspects of conspectus, there is a fair degree of local feel required; for example, there are no hard and fast rules for when one considers a book heavily or only moderately used. This is contingent on the subject, the level and the requirements of the school or department.

After refining my procedures during the Baillieu shelf scan, I went across to the library holding the strongest collection, the Earth Sciences Branch Library, located, appropriately enough, in the Earth Sciences School building. From there I went to all other branches on campus which I considered might contain significant collections falling within these DDC numbers. The fluid, interdisciplinary, nature of much modern teaching and research is well reflected in the disciplines of earth science. Within the University of Melbourne Library, titles falling in the relevant DDC numbers are dispersed across the campus. Although the strongest collection is in the Earth Sciences Branch Library, significant collections are housed in Engineering, Botany, and Zoology, with further items found in the research collections, the Educational Resources Centre of the Faculty of Education, Agriculture and Forestry, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematical Sciences, and even as far afield as Architecture and Planning. As Michalak remarks, the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of much modern teaching and research has resulted in the housing of library collections by subject specialty in branch or departmental libraries becoming increasingly inconvenient for users. They need to go to several campus libraries to pursue one research strategy. While members of the campus community appreciate the specialised and individualised service which the branch library provides, economic considerations and the goals of providing increasingly multi-disciplinary information services, or gateways to information rather than repositories of hard-copy collections, may move campus library systems in the opposite direction from departmentalisation by subject.5

The shelf scan took 21 hours, as the collections are large. A smaller collection would not entail such a time span. Computer Science, for example, took 6 hours only.

I also consulted with the Maps Librarian, the Special Collections Librarian and the Rare Books Librarian in my evaluation of the collections, and received much valuable assistance from the Maps Librarian in particular, maps forming an important resource in the earth sciences. The maps collection of the University Library holds about 20,000 items in the earth sciences field, including a gift collection from the Dept. of Agriculture, Energy and Minerals Victoria. Collections such as the microforms and audio-visual collections were also scanned.

After I had completed the shelf scanning, I drew the information from all the scattered locations together as I entered it in the database. This was a time-consuming but unavoidable task.

List Checking

During the same weeks, I checked the lists recommended by the National Library of Australia against the holdings in the Library catalogues, both card and online. In an endeavour to use Australian lists for monographs, ANB for 1991, 1992, and 1993 were checked. These had the practical advantage of being in DDC order but the decided disadvantage of including all levels of material, so that it was necessary to filter out inappropriate levels. The low percentage rate held in the collection does not, therefore, indicate a poor collection. With the benefit of hindsight, ANB (and BNB) should not have formed part of the list checking. The most suitable and thorough list for monograph checking was Information Sources in the Earth Sciences, despite its date of publication (1989). It was comprehensive, particularly for serials, dictionaries and historical literature. For serials checking, I used AESIS, the Australian list, from which the University of Melbourne Library rated 68.63% held. Although my checking of the international list, Bibliography and Index of Geology, revealed that the Library achieved only 34.83%, many titles on the international lists are of parochial interest only. It was instructive to check the list supplied by Shaw6 of the 415 titles which together contributed 90% of all items in the physics subject areas, in a one year period, to the INSPEC database. Of the entire 415, the University Library held 219 (52.77%), but of the top 100, the Library held 78%. It is hoped that this bears out the truth of Bradford's Law of Scattering, which indicates that the small specialist library can, provided its journals have been selected with care, supply a considerable proportion of the appropriate current literature to its users. Anecdotal evidence from overseas visitors indicates that the Physics Research Branch Library is good by international standards, and the Survey of Major Library Collections in the Geosciences in the State of Victoria, 1982, indicated that Melbourne had the most complete serial runs for geosciences. The list checking for Earth Sciences took 57 hours, whereas for Computer Science, it involved only 10 hours. The length of time for Earth Sciences was partly the consequence of checking during the death throes of the Library's old OPAC, whereas Computer Science was checked in the new OPAC, a much faster processs.

Expert Evaluation

In my discussions with academic staff, I asked them whether the collections met their needs for teaching or research, or whether they needed to use interlibrary loan or document delivery services. I found it was also an opportunity to discuss other matters of concern to the academic staff. For example, while they are all passionately devoted to their branch libraries, they dislike the scattered nature of the collections across campus - a result of the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of modern teaching and research. Thus it was an opportunity for the academic staff to air their grievances as well as discuss the collections. Issues raised were incorporated in the final Conspectus Report and, where possible, action was taken to comply with requests. For example, mathematics journals are to be relocated to the renovated mathematics library now that it has been increased in size.

Caveats

Each discipline is different and has differing information requirements; for example in Physics, conference proceedings are not significant (though there are exceptions), whereas in Engineering the conference proceedings are vital, and in Computer Science presenting a paper at a prestigious conference is more valuable than having an article published in a refereed journal. One has to be wary of transferring assumptions between disciplines. In Earth Sciences maps are of great importance as sources of information along with handbooks, guidebooks. etc., whereas in chemistry and astronomy large databanks are vital resources.

Benefits

While the technique is indisputably costly in terms of staff time, the benefits are undeniable. Having now completed 5 projects, I can see definite benefits just for the individual library. It lets you know clearly the state of your own collections, in content, condition, and format. In a library system like that of the University of Melbourne, it is also useful to see where the items in each DDC area are housed. In Mathematics, for example, the largest collections are actually in the research collections, the Baillieu (which is the undergraduate library), and in the Institute of Education Library, not the Mathematics Branch Library.

A thorough Conspectus evaluation is more than just the basis of a collection management policy: it is already at least half-done when you have completed a conspectus report, as I discovered when I wrote the Mathematics Collection Management Policy.

It gives clear evidence of strengths and weaknesses. The graph format of the data in the database gives clear and immediate visual impressions of the collections and where they require adjusting to bring the existing acquisition levels into alignment with the goal levels. The Library Committee has decided to allocate any extra funds received, such as the Research Infrastructure Grants, to areas which the Conspectus has indicated are not supporting the research and teaching functions of the University to the required level.

As a new member of the University Library staff, I found it a most helpful exercise in learning the nature of the collections and the teaching and research activities they are purchased to support. It was also a convenient mechanism for getting to know the academic staff.

Conclusion

The conspectus evaluation was a fascinating introduction to the collections and teaching and research programmes of the University. Anecdotal evidence from the academic staff in Physics that the collections are missing the latest editions of monographs, dictionaries and handbooks was substantiated by the list checking, so it can be seen to be not a purely subjective approach but one where list checking and shelf-scanning confirm the impressions of those who use the collections.

The exercise has made the task of writing collection management pollices for the subject areas in my bailiwick a far less daunting proposition than it had initially appeared.


Notes

  1. The Australian Conspectus: National Task Force on Conspectus Final Report Canberra ACLIS 1989
  2. Henty, Margaret Australian Conspectus Manual : a Collection Assessment Guide Canberra ACLIS 1992
  3. Walcott, Rosalind Library Collections in the Geosciences in the State of Victoria: report prepared by Rosalind Walcott on behalf of the Australian Advisory Council on Bibliographical Services Melbourne AACOBS 1982
  4. Henty op. cit p 32
  5. Michalak, Sarah 'Planning academic library facilities: the library will have walls' Journal of Library Administration vol 20 no 2 1994 p 98
  6. Shaw, Dennis F. ed Information Sources in Physics 3rd ed London Bowker-Saur 1994

Last modified: August 18 2004.