ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a technique designed to identify, in a continuing fashion, those items in a library collection that are used and to highlight their accessibility while providing for the disposition of items that are not used. Various pragmatic approaches to identifying used/nonused material do exist and, as a starting point, they were carefully examined to determine whether or not the techniques of measurement could be adapted to produce automatic techniques for dealing with the highlighting or disposition of material. Nevertheless, to satisfy those who criticized that approach to collection management, the research staff of the Institute re-examined the problem to see if pragmatic approaches which would reverse that situation might be developed. “A characteristic of inventory in business or industry is that approximately 80% of the number of transactions taken from a warehouse represents about 20% of the items stocked.”
