The Acquisition of Faculty Member Publications at Their University Libraries.

In this paper I present a case study to test whether two large ARL libraries adequately collect the monographic publications of their local faculty members. The university libraries' consistently low acquisition rates of publications of their faculty members over time and across the publishing industry cannot be attributed to any single cause. I discuss the many difficulties in acquiring faculty member publications and conclude by suggesting means to improve the acquisition of faculty member publications. Implications and applicability of these two case studies for other academic libraries also are discussed.

Academic libraries certainly collect campus faculty member publications, yet few collection development policies address the issue of these publications. Futas (1984, 8) presents the example of San Diego State University Library:

The Library acquires faculty publications according to the collection policies that determine book and periodical selection in general. That is, those works that are appropriate for an academic library are acquired as they are published. The campus publication The Weekly is reviewed by Technical Service staff routinely for faculty publication notices, but bibliographers are encouraged to give early notice of faculty publications in their subject areas. Textbooks published by the faculty must be purchased under the same criteria as textbooks in general.

This example is quite explicit in its description of the scope of collecting faculty member publications as well as in its detail about acquisition procedures; such emphasis, however, is rare. If faculty member publications are mentioned in collection development policies, often acquisition methods or procedures are not presented. The University of Detroit Library policy, for instance, simply states that local faculty authorship is an acceptable criterion for monograph selection (Futas 1984). The library collection development policies of Eastern Illinois University (Futas 1977) and Iowa State University (Futas 1984), on the other hand, place the responsibility for acquisition of campus faculty member publications upon the university archives. Some policy statements even dictate highly selective archives of faculty member publications. For example, the College of St. Catherine collects only faculty member theses, and the University of Wisconsin-Stout collects only faculty members' personal papers (Futas 1984 ). In many more college and university libraries, there are no guidelines at all for collecting faculty member publications.

I am working under the assumption that faculty member publications should be collected by the authors' own academic libraries. Although the library literature is devoid of any discussion on the topic, there are myriad commonsense reasons for the acquisition of campus faculty member publications, including:

* faculty members publish in disciplines supported by the university and its library, and so the subjects of the publications should be within the scope of the library collection;

* the university has an obligation to maintain a record of the intellectual achievements of its faculty members, and the library is an appropriate location to house their works, given its existing acquisition, cataloging, reference, storage, and retrieval systems;

* faculty members place their publications on course syllabi, so students need access to the works;

* students are interested in reading the publications of their instructors;

* other faculty members are interested in reading the work of their colleagues;

* tenure and promotion, accreditation, or internal review processes require quick and extensive access to faculty member publications;

* scholars and interlibrary loan librarians often look to the institution of a faculty author for access to the latter's scholarship;

* faculty members want their publications collected by the library for personal gratification, or because access to their work leads to further scholarship, citations, internal promotion, and international recognition; and

* it just makes good public-relations sense for a library to collect the publications of its faculty members.

Many prospective faculty members accept or decline job offers based upon the quality of the academic library. For example, Cluff and Murrah (1987) polled faculty members at the four largest public universities in Texas. They found that 49.7% of faculty members surveyed considered the library a significant factor in accepting their present position, 49.7% visited the library on their own during on-site interviews, and 68.2% of the faculty members surveyed considered the importance of library resources in research efforts "considerable" or "very high." Hart (1955) and Hamlin (1981) …