Abstract
Report of a survey carried out at the University of Bradford to compare the effectiveness of Books in English with conventional tools. The survey was carried out over a period of a year, and samples were taken from the weekly acquisitions intake of the University of Bradford. The sample was checked in three British and three American bibliographies as well as Books in English.
In addition to measuring the overall success rate, the number of checks which were carried out were compared with the success rate to give a checks per success rate (C/S). The results showed that Books in English compared favourably with other checking tools, and that if it were to adopt a monthly cumulation policy it could achieve a very high success rate and a much better C/S rate.
An important and disturbing finding of the survey was the very high total failure rate: 9.8% of the sample were not found in any of the bibliographies.
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