The Challenge of Evaluating and Developing an Interdisciplinary Collection: The East Asian Collection at the Public College

When the faculty of the College of Staten Island, CUNY (CSI) introduced a new baccalaureate level program in East Asian Studies the library faced the challenge of evaluating the adequacy of its holdings to support the program and its future development. Multidisciplinary fields of study (e.g., East Asian Studies) that pertain to a specific geographical or cultural area present a unique set of evaluative issues because their subject content cannot be confined to set classification ranges, rendering the traditional methods of collection analysis inadequate. This poster will present the results of an evaluation of CSI’s East Asian Studies collection, discuss some of the challenges the authors encounter when analyzing this collection, and it will propose ways that the collection can be strengthened in the future.

This analysis, as any analysis of a multidisciplinary field, must begin with clearly defining its span—in this case the scope of the East Asian Studies program at CSI. Then the authors will identify a few peer institutions with East Asian collections that can be used for purposes of comparison. Then the authors will examine how to best use the available tools (e.g., Aleph integrated library system, OCLC WorldShare Collection evaluation tool, and the CSI stacks).

The poster will then explore strategies for specific (call number, subject, and keyword) catalog searches and the types of searches available by the WorldShare Collection Evaluation tool which could render results relevant for the purpose of multidisciplinary content evaluation. The authors will share related subject headings lists and call number ranges that could be successfully used to cover the area of interest and the keywords crucial to successful searches.