Capacity and Usage of the Library Collection: a Case form University of Ruhuna

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.