Proposal for a State-Wide Assessment Project
Through the generosity of the ICCMCC and their understanding of the importance of collection analysis to cooperative collection development in Illinois and through the willingness of 77 individual libraries to invest in the project, the first part of a comprehensive collection analysis of academic libraries in Illinois has begun.
The ICAS (Interactive Collection Analysis Service) project will run an analysis of the collections based on the Pacific Northwest call number ranges (quite similar to the National Shelflist Count ranges). The analysis would be by division (50 large subject areas such as Language and Literature), by category (500 call number ranges), and by age. Title overlap and gap analyses of the libraries will be available. These studies will be made available to each contributing library on CD- ROM. The study will be done in both Dewey and LC call numbers.
Eighty of the 150 academic libraries in Illinois have agreed to allow the use of their records. Seventy-seven of these libraries have contributed to the project. The manipulation of the data for this part of the analysis has begun, and the results should be available in June.
When we met with participating libraries, three messages were very clear. Members were very interested in doing an assessment project, they were willing for CCMP to spend a considerable amount of money on it, and they wanted to take the level of reporting all the way down to the 5,000-subject level. So far, the ICCMP, though it has devoted all of its uncommitted money to the project, has not been able to provide the full amount necessary to fund the subject level.
Therefore, this proposal requests the additional funding to provide the subject level for the analysis project. To do so, would require a funding level of $208,796.16 (see attached proposal). It is suggested that the funding be provided over two years. Attached to this proposal is the estimate provided by OCLC/WLN for the extended project.
Year One
$104,400.00
Year Two
$104,396.16
The funding would be paid over the Fiscal 2003 and Fiscal 2004 years. The committee feels strongly that the analysis would be stronger, especially for medium and large academic libraries, and that the data would be more useful for targeting manageable cooperative collection development projects, if the size of the Statewide Metacollection analysis in a subject was more manageable. In addition, reporting at the subject level would be more useful to individual libraries as they use the data to improve collection development locally. There is wide support among libraries in ICCMP for this kind of analysis (see attached letter).
With the analysis, which will be completed this June, we will be able to begin a metacollection map which will identify strengths among the libraries in Illinois. These strengths can be the basis for collection partnerships that make all of the libraries stronger. This further analysis would enable us to target these partnerships to specific areas and thus enhance our ability to maximize our funding.