EVALUATING PUBLIC-LIBRARY ADULT FICTION - CAN WE DEFINE A CORE COLLECTION

Using the OCLC Online Union Catalog, the study identified those adult fiction books owned by the largest number of public libraries in order to determine if a core collection of titles could be identified for u se in evaluating adult fiction collections. This list of 406 most held titles was then compared to a number of standard collection developme nt lists to examine whether these tools would be useful in predicting widely held works. With the exception of the Wilson Fiction Catalog, ' 'best books'' lists did not perform well in predicting the widely held titles, nor did bestseller lists. Most of the widely held titles were published since 1980 and were clearly ''popular'' in nature. Implicat ions of these findings are discussed and recommendations are made for further research.