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University of North Texas at Dallas Library

Gap Collection

SLIS 5400 Fall 2009

Sarah Maddaford

Identification of Gap

Since the Needs Assessment does not currently identify the gaps in the collection at the University of North Texas at Dallas Library, the student chose a gap based on personal observation of the collection. The student also took the collections of the University of Texas at Austin and the University of North Texas at Denton into account when deciding on the gap to fill.

For the first two years of her undergraduate education, the student only used the library for leisure reading. Upon checking the Denton library’s collection, the student confirmed that universities carry a variety of non-academic materials. The library at UNT Dallas has a very small print collection with most of its materials available online or by Inter-Library Loan through an agreement with Denton.

This library has no pleasure reading materials relying solely on Denton and TexShare to allow students to find and borrow such materials. The student selected leisure reading as a fairly substantial gap into which almost any materials would be an improvement. Since UNTD Library is largely virtual, the pleasure reading section will be a draw to the physical library for patrons. As such, the collection will focus on hard covers and audio books both fiction and non-fiction that the patron can check out from the library.

Selection Resources

The student utilized five different sources for selecting materials for the collection including Magazines in Print for the four magazines selected. Some of the New York Times Bestsellers lists, several of the Publisher’s Weekly bestseller and most borrowed lists, some of the bestselling lists and Bowker’s Books in Print were all used to select materials.

The New York Times Bestsellers list is updated daily and appears online a week before the print version does. The student relied on most, but not all of the categories presented by the New York Times on November 1, 2009. The excluded categories were Paperback Advice, Children’s Books, and Graphic Books.

The Publisher’s Weekly Bestsellers Lists are updated weekly, which allowed the student to choose books from three weeks in each category used. The student did not pull titles from the bestselling audio books because they were out of date. The categories concerning children’s and religious books were also not used for selecting materials, but the Most Borrowed Lists were exceptionally useful.

was the best source for selecting popular books on CD because Publisher’s Weekly only had outdated lists for both fiction and non-fiction audio books. The student also utilized the Bestselling Books of Any Category, Romance, Mystery & Thrillers, Literature & Fiction, and Nonfiction lists from as criteria for selection.

Bowker’s Books in Print was used alongside Amazon and Publisher’s Weekly to select the format of the material based on price and durability.

Selection Criteria

The magazines were chosen utilizing Magazines in Print as well as their websites to determine price and popularity. Only four magazines covering general news and events were chosen until a proper needs assessment can be conducted.

On , the student selected the top ten books from the Books of Any Category excepting children’s books or books that had moved down the list in less than fifty days. In the Romance category, the top five books were selected unless they were only available on Kindle in which case the next book was chosen. In the Non-Fiction, Mystery &Thriller and Literature & Fiction sections, the top five books were selected. The top five Books on CD overall and in Non-Fiction were chosen unless the audio book was more than $45 in which case the next one was selected instead.

The student selected the top five books in each of the first six categories on the NYT Bestsellers List page. Some of the paperback selections from the New York Times became hard cover in the final selection because the hard cover was readily available.

On the Publisher’s Weekly website, the student used the bestseller’s lists for hard cover and paperback fiction and non-fiction as well as the most borrowed lists. For the fiction and non-fiction lists, the student used the top five books from each week going back three weeks from October 26, 2009 to October 12, 2009 unless the book had only been on the list for one week. All books that had been on the list for five weeks or had moved up the list since the previous week were also selected from the same weeks as the top five books. The student only used the week of October 26, 2009 to select the top five books most borrowed from American libraries.

Some of the purchases were selected by more than one resource and were given priority when the final selection caused some of the selections to be removed from the final table.

The student used different criteria for each selection source; but, when pulling together the final list, she had several criteria that applied to every item. Audio books were chosen over hard covers when they were available because of the popularity of this format with college age patrons. This held true for all decisions between hard cover and audio book format except when the audio book was more than $20 more expensive than the hard cover. Hard covers were chosen instead of paperbacks when available for durability of the book except when the hard cover cost more than twice as much as the paperback.

Review Resources

The student found reviews for most of the audio book, hard cover and paperback selections on Bowker’s Books in Print or Publisher’s Weekly. The reviews for the magazines that were selected were found using Magazines in Print.

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