Abstract:
Maintaining an appropriate collection to the university’s curriculum and research needis
a major responsibility of collection development of libraries.Thus statistics about
composition and utilization of library collection is a significant matter of consideration
in modern library management practices. Ensuring the collection and its utilization with
respect to the organizational goals is one among the complicated task that librarian
faces. Due to the fact the academic, research libraries grow with a range of increasing,
library materials measures should consider for obtaining accurate data about the library
collection and its utilization. According to Grover (1999) the primary requirement in any
assessment is the ability to provide enough statistical comparative data to understand the,
collection. No previous attempts have taken to evaluate the library collections and its
utilization across the library system of the university. The article presents a survey on
the capacity and usage statistics of an academic library collection. The objective is to
provide an empirical evidence on actual figures of the capacity and utilization of the
library collection by patrons, which is an essential information in library assessment and
decision making processes. Ruhuna University Library caters its services for eight
faculties and administrative departments which consist of 7166 undergraduate students,
600 postgraduate students, 474 academic and 810 non-academic staff and many other
online and offline visitors to the library. Main library provide services for different
information requirements of scholarly community of the university. The survey adapts
reports generated using SQL queries through the library management system. The
library collection is consist of 165,332 library items, bout 300 titles of printed and
electronic journals, 3017 resources in electronic medium. Other than this there is a legal
deposit collection which consists of 160, 000 materials published in Sri Lanka after
1990. Usage statistics shows a checkout record of 7100 items, 474 renewals, and f386
online visitors to the library website per month. Annual circulation of the library is
approximately 100,000 transactions. There were 11,143 physical visitors to the library.
It can conclude that the library as a well-developed collection and the utilization of its
resources are in a satisfactory level.
