UNT Libraries evaluates its collections at the levels of individual resources and subject level, to determine in what ways the collections are, or are not, meeting the needs of its users efficiently. The Collection Assessment Department ensures that the libraries are effective stewards of the materials budget, and that the libraries are ensuring quality collections for our users.
Subject collections are reviewed on a regular basis, usually during an academic program review, as part of an accreditation review, or as part of the new academic program proposal process. Reports are created and provided to academic departments, subject librarians, Collection Development, and the university’s Office of Accreditation. Categories of measures used in the evaluations include capacity (holdings), need, quality, and utility (usage). Included in the evaluations are comparisons of many of these measures with those of both our current and aspirational peer institutions, as well as comparisons across time periods.
The Collection Assessment Department has used multiple tools and software for collection analyses, including Choreo, UnSub, Power BI, MINES, SQL Server, Qualtrics, Python, Tableau, GitLab, GitHub, EBSCO Usage Consolidation, MARCEdit, OCLC Connexion, and locally developed usage statistics collection tools.
Completed collection assessments can be found in the UNT Digital Library's Scholarly Works institutional repository.
MINES for Libraries: This report summarizes the University of North Texas Libraries' results from the MINES for Libraries© survey protocol from January 2015 to December 2019. The intention of the survey was to learn more about the usage of the Library's online resources, and the resulting data is robust and useful for longitudinal trends.
The Collection Assessment Department maintains public Tableau visualizations of MINES survey data. Subject liaisons use these to determine things like:
What resources are being used
Who is using the data (college affiliation)
What they are using the resource for
