Cost‐Benefit Model of Library Acquisitions in Terms of Use: Progress Report

K. Leon Montgomery, Stephen Bulick, John Fetterman and Allen Kent

Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 1976, vol. 27, issue 1, 73-74

Abstract: A project has been undertaken to study the use of library materials: to evaluate acquisition decisions in terms of subsequent use and to derive a cost‐benefit model for use in purchasing and resource sharing and in the weeding and retirement of little‐used materials. This first progress report considers only circulating books and monographs. Data derived from circulation records are analyzed in terms of the number of uses per individual item. A surprising result is the nearly straight‐line plot (semi‐log scale) that exhibits consistent halving of the number of items circulated with each successive increase in number of uses. These results are consistent over each of five years studied. The phenomenon is not yet explained. In addition, it is observed that only half of the collection is circulated one or more times over a five‐year period.

Date: 1976
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.4630270110

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamest:v:27:y:1976:i:1:p:73-74

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)1097-4571

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().