Evaluating an Interdisciplinary Research Collection

Building a collection to serve the needs of researchers in an interdisciplinary field can be difficult because it is hard to draw definite boundaries around the literature these researchers use. Librarians at the University of Michigan's Public Health Library assessed the quality of a portion of their interdisciplinary collection using a citation checking technique. Data gathered from the study were used not only to measure the strength of the library's holdings but also to look for patterns in items not held and in the types of material being cited by researchers in the field.