Collection Evaluation at a Small Technical Library

By Eric N. Kolber

Article published on: April 1, 2026 in the April 2026 E-Edition of the Army Civilian Journal

Read Time: < 11 mins

The logo of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Buffalo District, headquartered in Buffalo, NY, 12 March 2024. The Buffalo District delivers world class engineering solutions to the Great Lakes Region, the Army, and the Nation to ensure national security, environmental sustainability, water resource management, and emergency assistance during peace and war. (U.S. Army illustration by USACE Buffalo District)

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Buffalo District Library, is a federal technical library with a dedicated space in the district’s office. We mostly serve an internal population of several hundred patrons plus requests from outside institutions (universities, engineering firms, members of the public, other government agencies). Internal users include engineers (civil, environmental, geotechnical, coastal, hydraulic), lawyers, public affairs specialists, budget and finance, safety officers, project managers, and regulators. The collection consists of approximately 8500 items plus digital collections (including over 20,000 drawings and maps). The overall collection is currently around 50 percent digital.

The Move

The district office moved to a new location in August 2023. For two years prior to that, I worked on “The Move.” Moving a library, even a small one, was a massive undertaking for a solo librarian. Not only did I need to purge materials to fit the new space and sort through shelves of materials in other areas of the building (much of which was redundant), but users from around the building were dropping off materials from their workspaces. Between reviewing a lot of what we had, packing and unpacking it, and putting it back in order, I started to get the feeling that a lot of the book collection may be out of date. While much of our collection consists of internal project reports and drawings, what I was concerned about for this study was our general collection of outside guidance.

The Mission

Our library mission statement states that we support the district's operations by maintaining a relevant collection and providing research service. In that sense, the questions I started to ask were:

• What do we do here?
• What do we need to know how to do?
• What sort of knowledge do we need to draw from?
• What do we have here?
• What should we have here?
• What does an ideal collection look like, and how does our collection compare to that?
• Is our collection one that can perform the function it’s meant to?¹

The Corps of Engineers’ mission is to be a leading engineering organization. We need the resources to directly support that. If a patron here needed guidance for a current project, would they find the right information here? If not, then we’re not meeting the basic terms of our mission statement. For a library of our size, I decided long ago to limit our collection scope. We don’t have the space, time, or budget to be an all-encompassing engineering library like a major university’s library does. While we are a repository for institutional knowledge about the Buffalo District’s projects and history, it’s beyond our means to be more than a source of current guidance for everything else. But even that is a worthy mission and standard to attain and maintain.

I started in October 2024 by reaching out to some professional colleagues for advice. Sometimes a process can be expedited or improved by tapping into others’ lessons learned and best practices. Often when I’m hunting for something, it’s useful to ask as a librarian, “Who out there would know this?” I talked to librarians at the USACE Headquarters library and I received responses from engineering librarians Paul Grochowski of the University of Michigan and Matt Marsteller at Carnegie Mellon University. The questions I was asking weren’t asked in the same way as they were asked at these places, but the librarians did make some suggestions. What I needed to do was evaluate the current utility of what we have. Villanova University did a similar evaluation of their collection, a “qualitative review,” beyond what is and isn’t circulating.² Circulation numbers can be a very good barometer for a collection, but for such a small patron base here, usually when something is needed it’s only needed by one person or a handful of people.³ It may be something that only needs to be referred to when there’s a problem, but we need to have the updated guidance on hand when that comes up. Whether an item circulates at all is a good question for us (“is it used?”), but it may not be many times or that often (“yes, by one person when they need it.”). What if that subject is needed, but we just don’t have the right materials? Hence, we needed a qualitative review. Too much of the collection wasn’t circulating at all, and a qualitative review might show us what we needed to improve. I could see that some things weren’t moving, but I needed to know why. If we could present a better collection to users, that might lead to improved utilization.

Qualitative Review

The librarians I consulted suggested a few programs. OCLC’s GreenGlass was one, but it didn’t sound useful. It would compare our collection to others in terms of how unique it was. But what I needed was a qualitative comparison. ProQuest’s Resources for College Libraries was another recommended program that would give me bibliographies created by university-level subject matter librarians. For such a focused collection as ours, however, built around a handful of topics, I found the lists too short and unspecific for our needs. If someone comes in and needs information on how to do something, they’re usually going to need more than an introduction. Reference lists from previous projects were another idea—but these might simply tell me how something was done before and not necessarily how it should be done now.

Along the lines of wondering who might know what we need to know, I thought it would be useful to see what university-level engineering courses are using for their classes. Finding current course syllabi could be a way to see what the current guidance is compared to what we have in our collection. Most syllabi aren’t publicly posted. Universities don’t want others to know what they’re teaching; otherwise, competitors could copy their programs. But some schools are required by state law to post theirs, such as the University of Texas. I had hoped to see some patterns—for instance, that certain books were used by similar courses at many universities. Those might be considered “core texts” that I should keep. However, I found that most books assigned by college courses were (a) introductory texts, which may no longer be suitable for engineering professionals in our setting; and (b) textbooks meant for class use, which might not be suitable as a long-term reference at a library. There’s also the question of who to ask: are the universities teaching the most current and effective methods of doing things, or should I talk to people in the industry itself?

The current, useful items in the collection toward which I would want to point patrons shouldn’t be crowded out by unwanted reading material, so knowing what to have from a qualitative standpoint is essential.

The bulk of the project entailed creating bibliographies for each subject that our collection covers (what we do, what we need to know about), mostly by call numbers. Beyond just engineering subjects (coastal, hydraulic, environmental, chemical, geotechnical, concrete, soils, foundations, flood control, dams, water control, dredging), we also have sections on local history, leadership and management, legal matters (especially pertaining to navigation, environmental, water rights, wetlands, contracts, and personnel matters), contracting, safety, geology, regional flora and fauna, invasive species, harbors, and navigation. The first section was a list of what we currently had for each. An accurate, current inventory of the collection was required. The next sections were lists for the same topic from each of four major engineering publishers (ASCE, Wiley, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis), OCLC, Amazon, and a peer institution, the University of Michigan, whose online catalog allows for browsing along by call number. I limited the searches to within the last ten or fifteen years, unless something was specified by someone. I also included whatever I could identify from college course syllabi. I wanted to get a picture of what was out there and compare it to what we had.

At this point, I reached out to anyone I could identify in our office and around the Corps of Engineers as a subject matter expert. I sent the bibliographies I’d built thus far and asked for feedback on what’s useful, what isn’t, what they’d recommend that we keep, discard, and obtain.⁴ The current, useful items in the collection toward which I would want to point patrons shouldn’t be "crowded out by unwanted reading material," so knowing what to have from a qualitative standpoint is essential.⁵ Some of the responses were incredibly valuable—insight on what users need, what sources are useful, what should be discarded as outdated guidance that shouldn’t be referenced. For instance, the technical writers I talked to replied that I should have the current editions of style manuals (and specific ones for what someone might be writing about) so there is no chance of creating websites, articles, and press releases that appear out of date. Chemical engineers said that some books needed to be updated, while other books were detrimental to the collection, because they contained outdated regulations that should not be used for current decisions. In many cases, I was able to identify updated editions/versions of books we already have. For a librarian, that’s incredibly valuable feedback that can be used going forward for that subject.

For the next step, I wanted to identify what other institutions held each of these items. To be able to compare ourselves to leading engineering libraries, I thought it might be beneficial to know what they have (I liked the idea of getting our collection to that peer level). In the end, I didn’t find this very useful. Many of those large engineering libraries have a lot of historical guidance as well as current publications because they are large, general repositories for knowledge.⁶ Maybe they are accessing those by way of an eBook subscription package, or they do not have as much funding for new purchases. I wanted to be able to say, “to be an engineering library with a collection on par with these leading institutions, we should also carry these materials,” but they weren’t all as consistent as I thought. I was already aware of the unique items we have, which are our district project reports and studies done by other regional entities.

Finally, I looked at each of our existing books and compared them to the lists of current materials available as well as to professional feedback. This was very useful. When comparing things one by one, I was able to see which ones were out of date. Sometimes we had a much older edition of a particular book, and this was an opportunity to update to the latest one, or the guidance we had was out of date and there were completely new books out there. Sometimes it depended on the subject. For environmental engineering, the guidance may have changed more over the past several decades compared to, for example, hydraulic engineering, where calculating wave heights may not have changed. Safety guidance needs to be kept up to date, considering changing technology and standards. I also factored in the user feedback—in some cases, that old book remains the authoritative source, and I had the recommendation to back up keeping it. In other cases, a subject matter expert told me that this was no longer relevant and to maintain a useful collection, it needed to be replaced. For each of these lists I was able to produce a recommendation for each book we currently have (keep, consider, discard/replace) and identify books available elsewhere that should be obtained to get our collection to a higher standard.

Plan of Action

I produced a plan of action for each section of the collection, with lists for each that identify what to keep, what to discard, and what is recommended for purchase. Most of these lists ended up being eight to twelve pages long, with forty-two in total. Where did we need to get better? Where were the gaps? The results varied by subject. For some topics like dredging, soil mechanics, flood control, coastal engineering, and geology, our collection was strong, and few things needed to be replaced or updated. For others, such as safety guidance, concrete, and chemical engineering, most of it needed to be replaced. To enact this, we would update our collection to a level where a user could come in and be assured of having the latest peer-reviewed information to answer their question. I can update these lists periodically by performing the same searches and updating the results I found. Our physical library space doesn’t have much extra shelf space left, so it’s important that as we obtain new items, we identify similar items to replace.

I realized that I could have streamlined the process by spending less time on university syllabi and on listing what other libraries held these items. These ended up as less useful evaluation criteria in the end.

Overall, this project took me almost a year as a solo librarian in addition to my regular duties. It gave me a set of results with which to present a plan of action to request more funding. It allows us to target specific items for each section of the collection, more than simply finding out what was new from the publishers that year. Aligning our collection and our development strategy with the Corps’ mission points us toward the highest level of utility and professional library service. “Regular assessment promotes responsible stewardship of our library’s general collections.”⁷ It is hopeful that this process and set of results can be useful for other similar libraries to evaluate their collections. So far this has been successful at reviewing the collection and the identification of what we need and what actions can be taken. If these actions are taken, we’ll be able to demonstrate an impact by positive feedback from users and regular usage of the materials we obtain for them.

Notes