Assignment+3+-+quantitative+data

**This page contains the "raw data" from our automated library system...**
Our library assistant was extremely helpful in running these reports for the curriculum area (Civilizations 12) I have chosen to work with through this course. She ran a full report on the library collection which is found here:

Civilizations 12 covers art history and religion, along with major civilizations, so there were a series of reports that were run:

This one is the "bibliography" for a search of all media pertaining to "Art History":

Bibliography for the subset "Religion"

Bibliographies for the subset "Art" (done by the selection of media that fell within certain Dewey numbers:



Least circulated items in the subset "Religion":

Least circulated items in the subset "Civilization":

Least circulated items in the subset "Art History":

My notes:

When looking at the many lists, particularly under "least circulated" it became evident that a large number of the books seemingly never left the library. Immediately that meant to me that weeding that media wouldn't be harmful. However, when physically going through the stacks I found that a great number (although not all) of those books were "reference-like" in nature. That is, although they could be taken out by library patrons, they were mainly large volume books, many with art plates in them, that may have been used within the library facility itself but never taken out. Obviously, a physical observation of how students use this media needed to be undertaken. I will deal with that in the section on qualitative data.

The reports were fascinating to a library-beginner like me. There was so much information that our library assistant could find for me through the automated program we used. Although I won't use the overall report for this assignment, I thought it was helpful that the report indicated this information:

**Collection Information**

 * Date of Analysis: 11-Jun-2012 15:44:39**
 * Circulation System: generic MARC/852 holdings**
 * Data Integrity: Good: 97.55% holdings recognized**
 * of Records: 14642**
 * of Holdings: 15393**
 * Recognized Call Numbers: 15016**
 * Average Age: 1998**
 * Enrollment: 1362**
 * Items per Student: 11.02**
 * Recommended Items per Student 30**

at a glance you could see there were some gaps in the collection, given that the "recommended items per student" is 30 and we hold 11.02. I'm interested to know, however, from where the recommended number actually comes.