Modeling for the Management of Library Collections

This paper presents a general model for approaching the problem of control of the active collection of a library through the acquisition and weeding processes. It assumes that age of book and size of holding are important in this process and recognizes constraints related to shelf space and the acquisitions budget. It then discusses three special cases of the model with shelf space the binding constraint as well as certain empirical work that tends to support a negative exponential form for demand as a function of age.