Mapping Change: An Examination of Curricular Shifts and Collection Impact

Whether adding a new course or ending a program, curricular changes represent a formal notification from the university to the library that it must support. At American University, all curriculum changes require, as part of the approval process, a library review. While these reviews are shared with collection managers, there has never been a systematic review of the effect the changes have had on purchasing and use. One of the most prohibitive factors in undertaking such as review is that curricular changes are often difficult to map to collections because they reflect interdisciplinary adjustments or courses that push the boundary of what one might associate with a subject, such as cooking with chemistry. In this paper, we demonstrate a method of how to use Library of Congress (LOC) subclass terms to index curricular changes and how to map those LOC subclasses to our integrated library system and electronic resource holdings.