An exploratory comparison of eight collection assessment measures in a university research library

Eight scientific and medical subject collections were evaluated using nine different measures. The subjects were anatomy, botany, electrical engineering, geology, pathology, pediatrics, surgery and zoology. The first two measures utilized the probability of owning journal articles from appropriate abstracts and indexes, and owning monographs from the corresponding L.C. classes on the MARC Tapes. The third measure traced the circulation of recently added monographs in the corresponding L.C. classes. The fourth measure checked the ownership of items cited in annual review volumes. The next three measures dealt with the ownership of faculty publications, references in these publications, and citations to these publications. The last two measures were derived from questionnaires evaluating the importance and quality of collections that were sent to departmental faculty and science librarians.;There was a statistically significant difference in the results when only measures of ownership are considered for each of the subjects. Circulation did not consistently yield statistically significant relationships with other research oriented evaluations. When date and type of publication, and language mirror usage of the fields being evaluated, these factors did not appear to affect the evaluation results.;Both librarians and faculty agreed on evaluations of the quality of journal collections. There was a significant relationship between ownership of references in faculty publications and faculty evaluation of the quality of the journal collections. There was a non-significant correlation between rankings for the subjects studied when the results for all measures were converted to rankings.