Collection Evaluation in the University Library: List Checking with Resources for College Libraries

Abstract

This study uses the collection centered evaluation technique of List Checking to evaluate the music literature collection in three New Zealand University libraries, using a random selection of 300 titles from Resources for College Libraries (RCL), published between 2000 and 2008 in the subject of music.

After checking the titles against the Online Public Access Catalogues of Otago University in Dunedin, Canterbury University in Christchurch and Victoria University of Wellington, the result was Victoria University held 44% of the sample; Otago University held 41% of the sample; and Canterbury held 30% of the sample. Of these holding it was found that all of the libraries had strength in the subject of the History and criticism of various aspects of music such as biography and popular music. It was also found that there was a strong Reference collection such as Dictionaries and Encyclopedias and Bibliographies. RCL was found to be a suitable tool for collection evaluation despite its American bias and data collection problems during the study.