Measures of Social Science Collection Development Costs and Their Relationship to Conspectus Standards:

Abstract

Costs of books and serials in all fields of scholarship have become an increasingly serious collection development problem for academic libraries, research libraries and others. Factors over which libraries exercise little control, such as diminished Federal and state funding, affect attempts to maintain collections. Although a variety of suggestions have been made to combat such factors as exponentially rising prices for scientific serials, solutions remain unclear. The Research Libraries Group Conspectus suggests that numerical evaluation of collections helps in resource sharing and related collection activities. This article suggests that the method for calculating costs has leaned too heavily on such factors as inflation and too little on changes in book productions by discipline. The impact on collections may therefore have been underestimatedd. Combining the numerical weights of the Conspectus with estimates of publication production and change provides a better way to estimate collection developmen...