College and Research Libraries RICHARD HUME WERKING AND CHARLES M. GETCHELL, JR. Using Choice as a Mechanism for Allocating Book Funds in an Academic Library College and university libraries have long used a variety of criteria to allo- cate funds for book purchases . This article reiterates the need for a "litera- ture-size" approach to book fund allocations and presents a case for using reviews from Choice magazine as a useful and hitherto ignored · means of determining literature size. Data from one calendar year (eleven issues) show the number and percentages of titles and the dollar amount and per- centage represented by each subject category. Suggestions for updating the information are offered. OvER THE YEARS academic libraries have employed various criteria for allocating book budgets. Several of those criteria have been related to the activities of the local academic departments: number of faculty, number of student credit hours, number of majors, usually with a consideration of the level of courses and students . Another crite- rion involves local demands made on the collection, gauged by circulation of mate- rials according to subject classification. In addition, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries allocation based on the size of publication output by subject (in terms of titles and dollars) was, accord- ing to Schad, "often taken as an index of budgetary need. " 1 Although the "literature-size" approach to the allocation of book funds is apparently much less common nowadays than it once was, it has nevertheless had some cham- pions in recent years. 2 In 1970 Massman Richard Hume Werking is acting director, University of Mississippi Libraries, University , Mississippi; Charles M. Getchell , ]r ., is a refer- ence librarian, University of Kansas Libraries, Lawrence, Kansas. 134 I and Patterson observed, perhaps a bit too single-mindedly: An academic library's holdings can be determined only by the quantity and range of the materials being published which are relevant to the academic programs it is supporting, not by the traditional number-of-students criterion . .. . The only relevant reality is the reality of the number and quality of books being produced ... . Is there any college in the United States which does not need substantial coverage on such questions as the war in Vietnam, racial problems , student unrest, Shakespeare , the Civil War, Russian his- tory? If there is, is that institution really worthy of being called a college ?3 A year later Dillehay echoed the sentiment, emphasizing "the number and cost of books being produced," and in 1975 Voigt made the same point. 4 In 1967 McGrath provided a breakdown of books listed in the 1965 volume of American Book Publishing Rec- ord, BPR, giving for each subject category the number of titles and their cost. He then calculated the share of titles and of dollars accounted for by each subject, and he noted that perhaps one reason some academic de- partments fail to spend their allocations was that "not many books having relevance to their work have been published each yea11."5 Impressed by arguments on behalf of the literature-size approach as one important criterion for allocation, the collection de- velopment officer at the University of Mis- sissippi Libraries began in 1979 to seek a more balanced approach to the allocation of book funds. At that time a majority of those funds were allocated by the university administration among academic departments on the basis of a traditional " head-count " formula, specifically the number of student credit hours weighted according to level. Leaving those funds with the departments, the collection development officer wished as an experiment to divide the few remaining book dollars, for which librarians were re- sponsible, along very different lines. He wished to allocate for each discipline a share that would resemble its share of academic book publishing in a given year. Hence for the first time some of the criteria for divid- ing the university's book budget would orig- inate off campus. There is no entirely satisfactory source of information about the number of academic books published each year, by discipline, or their dollar cost. The best-known data are those published in th e Weekly Record of Publishers Weekly , cumulated annually in the American Book Publishing Record, BPR Cumulative (the source of McGrath's data) , and reprinted in The Bowker Annual of Li- brary and Book Trade Infonnation. There are several major problems with these sources. First , they report all U.S . book publishing, much of which (e.g. , medical and law texts, fiction, and highly popular treatments) would not be appropriate for most academic libraries. Second, foreign imprints are not included. And finally, the categories as cumulated in BPR and the Bowker Annual are insufficiently precise for allocation purposes. For example , " Science" is reported as a single category, as are "Phi- losophy/Psychology" and "Sociology/ Economics. "6 Other attempts to determine literature size, those by Massman and Patterson and by Dillehay, examined reviews in selected professional journals for one and two years respectively . Their reliance on reviews in scholarly journals is probably more Using Choice I 135 appropriate for most academic libraries than McGrath's use of ABPR . Yet the sub- ject-breakdown and cost data supplied by Massman and Patterson , drawn from re- views in 1967, are probably quite outdated by now and have relatively little application directly as allocation information. (Dillehay provided readers with no data showing breakdown of titles or costs by subject.) Moreover, the authors included only titles that they considered received favorable re- views and also were "of undergraduate sig- nificance . "7 Choice magazine , published eleven times a year by the Association of College and Re- search Libraries, appeared to be a valuable and neglected source of information about the size and composition of the academic literature. This selection was confirmed in conversations with bibliographers at several large and small universities. Since 1964, Choice has published short reviews of books selected by its editors as "serious literature" and as "significant current publications .. . in the literature of [a] field and in an under- graduate library collection. "H Despite its avowed bias toward undergraduate items, reviews frequently note a title 's suitability for graduate work, and Choice's coverage of university presses and the commercial aca- demic publishers such as Wiley , Sage, Free Press , and Elsevier seems quite c'ompre- hensive. 9 The reviews , arranged in forty- eight subject categories , provide complete bibliographic information , including price. It was decided to compile the number of ti- tles reviewed in one calendar year and their cost, for each of the forty-eight subjects . Unfortunately, the data had to be com- piled manually from Choice . The journal does produce lists for in-house use, showing for each issue the number of titles by sub- ject area , and these figures hav e been cumulated for each volume year. But thus far the data have not been widely available. Moreover , the Choice staff has not yet pro- duced financial data showing the dollar amounts of titles reviewed , either in the aggregate or broken down by subject.* Consequently , the collection development officer and a student assistant compiled the *Such data should be readily at hand once the journal goes to computer-assisted publishing. 136 I College & Research Libraries • March 1981 information from Choice for 1978, title by title. The number of titles and the prices were subtotaled for each Choice subject category each month, then added together to get a yearly total for the subject cate- gory.* Table 1 gives the results for all subjects combined. It shows that in 1978 a library could have purchased every book reviewed in Choice, including a large number of ref- erence items, for $124,931. TABLE 1 RESULTS OF CHOICE STUDY: ALL TITLES No. of Dollar Avg. Amount Titles Amount per Title All subjects 6,636 $124,931 $18.83 Two adjustments were deemed necessary before percentages and average prices could be satisfactorily figured for each subject area. First, four titles were excluded from consideration because of their highly unrep- resentative prices. Three of these were re- print sets and the other a set of documents in facsimile. t Table 2 shows the result after eliminating these four titles. The second adjustment dealt with refer- ence materials. As table 3 shows, Choice's "reference" category accounted for almost 13 percent of the total cost of the reviewed books. Principally because of the category's mixture of general and subject-specific *The authors worked strictly from the biblio- graphic information provided in the reviews themselves and did not include items cited in the bibliographic essays. tThese item~ were: Blacks in the United States Armed Forces, ed. Morris M . MacGregor and Bernard C . Nalty , Scholarly Resources, 12 volumes, $595; Studies in Fascism: Ideology and Practice, AMS Press , 50 volumes , $1,016; U.S. Congress, Congressional journals of the United States , 1789-1817, Michael Glazier, 65 volumes, $2 ,316; Lost Race and Adult Fantasy Fiction , Arno, 69 volumes , $1 ,500. TABLE 2 RESULTS OF CHOICE STUDY: LESS FOUR TITLES No. of Dollar Avg. Amount Titles Amount per Title All subjects 6,632 $119,504 $18.02 items, it was excluded for purposes of de- termining each subject's share of the schol- arly literature, and other means were used to establish locally a dollar figure for refer- ence purchases. Proportions were calculated, and alloca- tions to the reference bibliographers deter- mined, largely on the basis of each subject's dollar share of the literature. Table 4 shows the distribution among the remaining sub- ject areas defined by Choice. Excluding the four titles noted above and the reference category, 6,179 titles were reviewed during 1978, costing $104,024, for an average per- title cost of $16.83. Using data from Choice to determine academic book publishing output is by no means flawless. One inevitable problem is the categorization of titles. Many schools have programs and departments, such as black studies or American studies, that are not explicitly represented in the Choice categories , although numerous books in these areas are reviewed by the journal. Special arrangements must be made in such instances . Also , as universities become more narrowl y vocational, they may need more library materials that are not defined as traditionally academic, and the Choice ti- tles may not adequately reflect those needs. Nevertheless, Massman and Patterson, Voigt, and others have already made a good case that book allocations for an academic li- brary should reflect, to a significant degree, the proportions of books published · by disci- pline and their costs. The manner in which they do so will likely depend on the indi- vidual library' s perceived mission and its ability to act on that pe~ception. At present Choice seems to be a useful, and Uf.ltapped, TABLE 3 Reference RESULTS OF CHOICE STUDY: REFERENCE MATERIALS No. of Titles 453 % of Titles 6.83 Doll ar Amount $15,471 %of Total Amount ($ 119,504) 12.95 Avg. Amount per Title $34 . 15 Using Choice I 137 TABLE 4 RESULTS OF CHOICE STUDY: LESS FOUR TITLES AND REFERENCE MATERIALS %of Avg. No. of %of Dollar Total Amount Subject Titles Titles Amount Amount per Title General 47 0.76 $ 717 0.69 $15.25 Humanities, General 92 1.49 1,485 1.43 16.14 Art 315 5.10 8,378 8.05 26.60 Communication Arts 71 1.15 997 0.96 14.03 Language and Literature 97 1.57 1,298 1.25 13.38 Linguistics 22 0.36 332 0.32 15.07 Classical 18 0.29 241 0.23 13.41 English and American 834 13.50 10,357 9.96 12.42 Germanic 51 0.83 629 0.60 12.35 Romance 101 1.63 1,239 1.19 12.27 Slavic 46 0.74 608 0.58 13.22 Other 67 1.08 873 0.84 13.03 Performing Arts 16 0.26 241 0.23 15.07 Dance 21 0.34 272 0.26 12.95 Film 80 1.29 1,256 1.21 15.70 Music 138 2.23 2,084 2.00 15.10 Theater 34 0.55 471 0.45 13.84 Philosophy 197 3.19 2,800 2.69 14.21 Religion 300 4.85 3,595 3.46 11.98 TOTAL HUMANITIES 2,500 40.45 37,156 35.72 14.86 Science and Technology 102 1.65 2,174 2.09 21.31 History of Science and Technology 85 1.38 1,477 1.42 17.37 Astronautics and Astronomy 22 0.36 523 0.50 23.78 Biology 231 3.74 5,468 5.26 23.67 Chemistry 95 1.54 2,716 2.61 28.59 Earth Science 84 1.36 2,519 2.42 29.99 Engineering 241 3.90 6,207 5.97 25.75 Health Science 92 1.49 1,369 1.32 14.88 Information Science 53 0.86 1,080 1.04 20.37 Mathematics 70 1.13 1,577 1.52 22.54 Physics 47 0.76 1,352 1.30 28.77 Sports and Recreation 73 1.18 753 0.72 10.32 TOTAL SCIENCES 1, 195 19.35 27,215 26.17 22.77 Social and Behavioral Sciences , General 156 2.52 2,554 2.46 16.37 Anthropology 102 1.65 1,731 1.66 16.97 Business, Management, Labor 136 2.20 1,952 1.88 14.36 Economics 242 3.92 4,270 4.10 17.65 Education 129 2.09 1,610 1.55 12.48 History, Geography, Travel Ancient (including 116 1.88 1,887 1.81 16.26 archaeology) 67 1.08 1,460 1.40 21.79 Africa 38 0.61 621 0.60 16.34 Asia and Oceania 78 1.26 1,484 1.43 19.03 Europe Latin America and the 308 4.98 5,088 4.89 16.52 Caribbean 47 0.76 744 0.72 15.82 Middle East, North Africa 40 0.65 672 0.65 16.80 North America 275 4.45 4,423 4.25 16.08 Political Science 281 4.55 4,141 3.98 14.74 Psychology 142 2.30 2,185 2.10 15.39 Sociology 280 4.53 4,114 3.95 14.69 TOTAL SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES 2,437 39.43 38,936 37.43 15.98 GRAND TOTAL 6,179 99.99 104,024 100.01 16.83 138 I College & Research Libraries • March 1981 source of literature-size information for col- lege and university libraries. Until Choice adopts automated typesetting and can up- date the data in that fashion, or until ACRL or some other agency can do so manually, the information presented here should be of considerable use to academic institutions that wish to incorporate literature-size criteria into their allocation processes.* *In the meantime, a reasonable shortcut to up- dating the data presented above would be to obtain from Choice (or through ACRL if it would perform this useful service) its monthly and annual figures on the number of titles reviewed, by subject area, and multiply the number times the average price reported here , adjusted by a rate of inflation. If desired, the Bowker Annual could be used to gain an approximation of the various rates of inflation in the several subject areas . REFERENCES 1. Jasper G. Schad , " Allocating Book Funds : Control or Planning?" College & Research Li- braries 31:155 (May 1970); Melvin J. Voigt , "Acquisition Rates in University Libraries,'; College & Research Libraries 36:265 (July 1975). 2. Voigt, "Acquisition Rates," p.265. 3 . Virgil F . Massman and Kelly Patterson, "A Minimum Budget for Current Acquisitions," College & Research Libraries 31 :84 , 86 (March 1970). 4. Bette Dillehay, "Book Budget Allocation : Sub- jective or Objective Approach, " Special Li- braries 62:510 (Dec. 1971); Voigt, "Acquisition Rates, " p.265. 5. William E. McGrath, "Determining and Allo- cating Book Funds for Current Domestic Buying, " College & Research Libraries 28:269-72 Ouly 1967). 6. The Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information (24th ed. ; New York: Bow- ker, 1979), p.322. 7. Massman and Patterson , "A Minimum Budget for Current Acquisitions ," p .85. 8. Descriptive material sent by editor Louis B. Sasso to the authors , 1979. 9 . At the same time, it should be noted that Choice does not review material that the edi- tors consider strictly graduate level. Personal communication to the authors from editor Jay Poole, May 20, 1980.