A Study on the Korean University Library Collection

한국 대학도서관 수서(收書)에 관한 연구

Korean university libraries are increasing their library collection each year according to the standard set by the Ministry of Education. The standard states that all the university libraries are required to keep 3 books for newly enrolling students, 30 books for each enrolled student and 5, 000 books for each department. The increasing number of the university library collection brings many problems in the libraries. 1. The size of the library collection is not related to the satisfaction of the library user's requests. The satisfaction is usually related to number of the new publications received in the library. Z. The Korean publication is limited to a small number. It could not meet the university standard. Therefore, the number is filled with the foreign publications. But the use of them is not frequent. Even the number of the domestic and foreign new publications together could not meet all the requests of the university library users. Only cooperation with other libraries will be able to meet most of the diversified requests. 3. Most of the present library collection are not likely to be used in the future and they should be eventually discarded. Present library administration put too much emphasis on the size of library collection and only the aquisition of the material is main concern of the university librarians. They need to consider other factors in the aquistion of the library collection. They should make their collection development in accordance with user's requests in addition to meet the university standard.