Truett interviewed fourteen reference librarians to study weeding and evaluation practices.12 The main considerations given for weeding were age and use, but no one reported doing formal use studies. Her fourth conclusion is relevant to our purposes:
Virtually all reference librarians respect the importance of weeding; though lacking written guidelines, they often weed their collections continuously and can list a large number of unwritten weeding criteria. However, more formal use studies of reference sources could provide a more objective basis for weeding. Better inventory control procedures are also in order, especially given the lack of precise figures for collection growth or size.13
At the UWEC library, the reference staff undertook an empirical study, noting the number of uses each individual volume received.14 An item was considered used if it was reshelved by library staff. Student workers affixed as many as five dots inside the back cover of each volume returned to the shelves. After five years, the researchers collected and tabulated the data. The dots revealed that an astonishing 35 percent of the reference collection received no use in five years. If an acceptable use rate is once in five years, then the researchers “could eliminate about one-third of the titles.”15 If two uses in five years were the minimum, reference staff could withdraw 51 percent of the collection without notice by the patrons. Engeldinger did not indicate how the data were used for weeding, though he emphasized a much stronger understanding of reference book use is gained by researchers undertaking the study.
Biggs’ investigation of the pros and cons of various methods of researching reference book use provides a helpful outline of use study methods librarians have utilized in reference collections.16 Her explication of the positive and negative aspects of the reshelving technique reinforced and clarified the comments by Arrigona and Matthews (1988) and Engeldinger (1990). As with most of the authors considered for this study, Biggs bemoaned the lack of, and emphasized the need for, use studies in library reference collections. Similarly, she reported the need in the context of weeding.
One aspect of a study conducted at the William S. Carlson Library, University of Toledo, Ohio, was a use count in which each item replaced had a dot affixed to it.17 This article reports on the first year of the study and only provides statistics for the ready reference collection, not for the entire reference collection.
These writings provide the professional and historical context for the research reported in this study. In brief, use studies are easier and more common in circulating collections than in reference collections. All but one of the use studies of reference collections reported in recent years were limited either in time or in scope; that is, reporting use of only a portion of the reference collection.
Setting
The G. Allen Fleece Library (GAF) serves CIU’s higher education component, which offers bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees. At its heart, CIU is a bible college and seminary, but not all degrees are in bible-related studies. For example, CIU offers degrees in such fields as intercultural studies, missions, pastoral ministries, and youth ministries as well as Christian education, education, communications, music, psychology, counseling, and teaching English as a foreign language. CIU is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools; the Bible College division is an accredited member of the Association for Biblical Higher Education, and the Seminary is accredited by the Association of Theological Schools.
GAF’s reference section contains approximately 5,900 noncirculating volumes. In 1999, at the beginning of this study, the reference staff included one full-time librarian, a part-time worker, and a student worker who reshelved reference books daily and recorded the number reshelved. The student worker was the key person for the five years we were to collect data, the one on whom the bulk of the responsibility for the success of the study, fondly dubbed “the dotting project,” rested. During the course of the study, the library augmented the reference staff by making the assistant full time and adding two student workers to staff the reference desk. While GAF has a Web-based OPAC, budgetary constraints have prevented adopting an integrated library system (ILS), a lack that certainly made the process more time consuming than it otherwise might have been.
Methodology
Reshelving happened only once each day, while the library was closed. Beginning in the fall 1999 semester, a student worker affixed a colored adhesive dot inside the back cover of each reference book to be reshelved, as many as ten dots per book, per year. Each academic year had a distinct dot color to make it possible to identify use per year as well as overall. We anticipated that this system would not add much time to the reshelver’s job; in fact, it did. We found that adding a small dot on the spine of books with a full complement of ten for the current year substantially reduced the efforts of the student worker. This did necessitate removing the spine dot each year, a minor chore in view of the greatly relieved daily drudgery of the student worker.