Library staff developed a project to reclassify the Curriculum Materials Collection of a specialty library on the campus of a regional comprehensive university. Materials were reclassified from a custom classification system derived from those developed by Lois Belfield Watt in 1962 and Harlan Johnson in 1973, to the Dewey Decimal Classification.…

This case study explores the strategies used to redistribute materials among available shelves in a curriculum materials center after deaccessioning and relocation projects. The librarian estimated imposed fill ratios based on collection segments which were then mapped onto a floor plan to efficiently shift materials. The estimated imposed fill…

Discovery of digital items by scholars and the public is highly dependent upon effective metadata to ensure inclusion and prioritization in search engines. Subject descriptions based on controlled vocabulary, such as Library of Congress subject headings (LCSH), are particularly useful to enhance discovery, but they may be expensive to provide. In…

Genrefying a library's fiction collection is a common practice in school libraries. However, there is little research to explain the benefits or drawbacks of this practice. Using a within-subjects/time-series action research design, this study was conducted to understand more about the impact of genrefying the fiction collection in a single…

Recently, a great deal of literature on patron-driven acquisition (PDA) has been published that addresses the implementation and results of PDA programs at academic libraries. However, despite widespread worries that PDA will lead to unbalanced collections, little attention has been paid to whether patrons' and librarians' purchasing differ…

Books are the most important medium of communication in the humanities, a major medium in the social sciences, and a central component of academic library collections. This study examined humanities and social sciences books that won prizes from ten leading United States disciplinary associations between 2000 and 2009. The study extends earlier…

The U.S. colleges and universities offering non-sectarian educational programs in Jewish Studies rely on the support of their academic libraries for research materials and library services. For college libraries which use Library of Congress Classification scheme, it is a common practice to integrate "studies" resources into their…

"University Futures, Library Futures: Aligning library strategies with institutional directions" establishes a new framework for understanding the fit between emerging library service paradigms and university types. It examined the impact of increased institutional differentiation in universities on the organization of academic libraries…

Introduction: Star and Bowker describe the residual as what does not fit into a category system and as an inevitable byproduct of classification. In this project, we explore what happens when we attempt to give prominence to the residual instead of minimizing it. Methods: The three authors created three "transformations" of a small…

This paper reports on a joint proof of concept project undertaken by researchers from the Flinders University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in partnership with information managers from the Education Network Australia (edna) team at Education Services Australia to address the question of whether artificial intelligence techniques could be…

Describes some of the confusing aspects of the Bibliography Section (Z Class) of the Library of Congress Classification system and recounts the preparation of a key showing a comparison of the A through P classes with their corresponding Z numbers. The comparative classification key is appended. (JL)

Authority records were compared for established headings that are identical in "Library of Congress Subject Headings" (LCSH, 18th edition) and "Moving-Image Materials: Genre Terms" (MIM). Both quantitatively and qualitatively, pairs of identical headings differ sufficiently from each other that the creation of authority records…

The result of a study which compared the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, 2d edition (AACR2), with current cataloging practices at the University of Cincinnati libraries, this report contains chapter-by-chapter commentary on the following areas: the cataloging philosophy of AACR2; general rules for description; books, pamphlets, and printed…

Presents findings of investigations of Library of Congress subject analysis of minority groups conducted at St. John's and Florida State Universities to determine if the analysis is prejudiced, offensive to the affected group, accessed via terms the intended audience would use, and if the vocabulary is objective. (FM)

Describes the elements of a selection decision model, and develops an outline for classification of library materials by source of origin. Descriptions of short- and long-term goals for collection development are included, as well as an outline of macro- and microselection decision making. (Author/MBR)