The contribution of library collections to prestige of academic programs of universities: a quantitative analysis

This study examines the relationship between library print collections and prestige of academic programs of universities in the United States. It is s ituated in the literature of access versus ownership and the theoretical fr amework of the economic behavior of universities. It specifically looks at the relationship between the total number of volumes and the number of seri als and rankings of academic programs as measured by the National Research Council. This study extends the economic theory of universities and nonprof it organizations to academic libraries and argues that academic research li braries seek to expand and maintain prestige of universities by expanding a nd maintaining their collections. Two hypotheses were tested using regressi on analyses. First, it is hypothesized that the size of the libraries' coll ections (total volumes) contributes to the prestige of academic programs. S econd, it is hypothesized that the size of the serial collections of Librar ies contributes to the prestige of academic programs, Regression models wer e formulated and tested. Data on rankings of academic programs were drawn f rom the report by the National Research Council. Regression results for all the academic programs are statistically significant at .0001 level and R s quares are between .29 and .47 for all the academic programs except philoso phy. Findings strongly confirm the hypotheses and show that Library volumes and serial subscriptions contribute significantly to prestige of all acade mic programs including the social sciences, physical sciences and math, eng ineering, and humanities. This study has significant policy implications. T his article argues that cutting back on volumes and serial subscriptions wi ll hurt quality of academic programs in the long run. There still exists a gap between getting needed items housed in the library and getting needed i tems through ILL and document delivery services in terms of speed and brows ing capability. This article further argues that scholarly communication is a complicated process and that many factors, such as cultural and psycholo gical factors, are involved in this process. Simply replacing ownership of print collections with electronic access services can abrupt that process, damage healthy scholarly communication, decrease the research productivity of scholars, and eventually erode the quality of academic programs. (C) 200 1 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.