Volume 6, Issue 3

Texas Tech University is a part of the Texas State University System which opened its doors in 1925. The current enrollment is about 24,000 dispersed among six colleges. The Mathematics Department is one of thirteen in the College of Arts and Sciences with a Ph.D. program. One of those programs is in statistics. Seven faculty members were identified from that program. Their contribution to published research for 1993 and the first half of 1994 was collected and a citation analysis was conducted and subsequently applied to the collection development process at the University Library, where distinct discipline based collection development policies are now being formulated. Two citation patterns were identified: bibliographic and non-bibliographic citations. Bibliographic citations (from the bibliography) numbered 394 from 122 titles. Journals and monographs were the two formats most frequently cited, 46.7% and 36.9%, respectively. The average age of a citation was 12.3 years. The two most frequently cited journal titles were: Journal of Time Series Analysis and Stochastic Processes and Their Applications. Non-bibliographic citations (not found in the bibliography) were used to identify the more important research topics to this population of faculty: Hermitian operators, Appel polynomials, Laplace transform, Euclidean space, Drichlet polynomials, Lebesgue measure, Hilbert space, and Taylor expansion. Since the conclusion of this study, the most frequently cited journals and monographs have been acquired or recommended for acquisition in conjunction with the Library’s collection development policy for Mathematics.

When we talk about subject authority control today, we must see it as a system that will support searching across the vast domain of the Internet. While we recognize that there are many difficulties, it is time to take a fresh look and to explore new kinds of solutions. Automatically generated graphical displays that identify information objects at many different levels but are organized by broad subject area should be designed as navigation tools. This means we need to take advantage of the new methods of document production by encouraging authors to add in subject keywords and most importantly broad class numbers with the help of expert systems software. This initial cataloging and classification can be refined subsequently by professionals but at least it will form a base for more sophisticated manipulation and indexing from the point of entry into the system. The significant problem today is how to filter out what you don’t want and restrict your search to documents likely to be useful.