The RLG conspectus down under: Report on an Australian seminar, “The RLG conspectus and collection evaluation”∗

Abstract

On 29 August 1988 the National Acquisitions Section of the Library Association of Australia continued its tradition of hosting seminars. Its latest offering, held as a precursor to the IFLA/LAA Conference in Sydney, was entitled “The RLG Conspectus and Collection Evaluation”. The purpose of this seminar was to discuss the value and appropriate application of the RLG Conspectus to Australian research and academic libraries. Approximately 100 delegates attended a highly successful program. The keynote speaker was Dr. Paul Mosher, lately deputy director of libraries at Stanford University and more recently director of libraries of the University of Pennsylvania. Mosher has been associated with Conspectus from the very beginning and has written and lectured widely upon it, as well as on such related topics as cooperation in collection development, collection evaluation, and automation and collection development [l]. Two of Mosher’s papers published in 1983 are regarded as catalysts for the idea of a coordinated national approach to collection development in Australia [2]. The Conspectus system was developed by the Office of Management Studies (OMS) of the Association of Research Libraries and the Research Libraries Group (RLG) in 1983 as a method of measuring collection levels in libraries. This system facilitates the assessment of a library’s existing collections and current collecting policy by dividing the collection into subject groupings and indicates the coverage of each grouping on a scale of comprehensiveness ranging from zero to five; a separate set of indicators is used to indicate language coverage [Appendix 11. The word “conspectus” has been defined as a breakdown of subject fields in such a way as to allow distributed collection responsibilities for as many fields as possible [3].