Quality And Demand: The Basis For Fiction Collection Assessment

Over the past half century, librarians have been increasingly interested in carefully and systematically examining their collections—making changes to strengthen and develop these sets of materials at both the individual library and the regional levels. Most of the techniques used to conduct these examinations were originally designed to evaluate the quality of nonfiction collections in academic libraries. In the past few decades, public librarians have successfully modified these techniques to evaluate both the quality and the use of their nonfiction collections. Recently, there has been surprisingly little literature on how these techniques could be applied directly to the evaluation of fiction collections in public libraries.