The Effect of Demand Level on the Optimal Size of Journal Collections
Edward T. O’Neill · Collection Management · 1978
A model is developed which minimizes the total annual cost of maintaining a journal collection with any given level of demand assuming that all requests will be met either from the collection or through interlibrary loans and that the obsolescence and scattering characteristics of the collection are known. The costs considered are the acquisition costs, storage costs, and the cost of interlibrary loans. The relationship between the annual number of requests and the optimal collection size is investigated. The collection comprehensiveness and the cost per request are also examined as a function of the demand level.