Use of Choice Reviews to Build the Geosciences Collection

The Nazarbayev University School of Mining and Geosciences was established in 2016 to study and conduct research on the vast mineral reserves of the country. The school now has three bachelor’s programs, two master’s programs and the recently launched PhD program. With emerging programs being introduced, it is vital to establish the academic and reference sources that the school will need to offer the courses. In 2018, the library acquired Choice Reviews Online to help the subject librarians build a strong discipline-oriented collection. This paper aims to identify the current holdings of the geosciences field based on Choice Reviews Online. The study used collection evaluation to analyze the strength of the collection


Introduction
In 2016, the Nazarbayev University opened the School of Mining and Geosciences.Currently, it has three bachelor's programs (Geology, Petroleum Engineering, & Mining Engineering), two master's programs (Petroleum Engineering & Mining Engineering), and a PhD program which was launched in 2018.These programs are aimed at expanding research and technology in the field of mining, sustainable development, use of earth resources, etc., and encompassing mainly the Earth science of Kazakhstan the region and the world.(Suorineni, 2018).Starting a new program requires reference materials housed in the library as well as new textbooks to be used by the upcoming students.Slowly, the library is acquiring discipline-oriented resources as recommended by the faculty members.The Subject Librarians also consult available publisher's catalog, and also do some benchmarking from our institutional partner from the USA which is the Colorado School of Mines.The Subject Librarians search the online catalog of the partner library for potential titles not owned by the library.In addition, the library purchased Choice Reviews Online to aid the subject librarian in their quest to build a standardized core collection.Building the print collection is as important as the eBook collection.There are still users who prefer to use print materials.In a study by Foote & Rupp-Serrano (2010), they mentioned that faculty and graduate students still prefer print books when reading the whole book as they are generally easier to use.

Methodology
The Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association (ALA) developed the Choice Reviews Online.Choice Reviews is the best origin which provides a comprehensive review of outstanding academic titles and book recommendations.For that the collection evaluation is used in this study to determine how many items from the Choice Reviews is already part of the collection.Analysis using Choice was used by subject librarians to compare whether the library is performing well in acquiring expected items as part of the collection (Stebelman, 1996).This will also show the depth of the collection based on existing standardized tools.The Subject Librarian consulted the online database and used the filter Earth Science under Science and Technology as well as Engineering under the same category.Adding a third keyword "geoscience" gave a result of 86 hits.The results will be used to compare what is already included in the current collection.The list was extracted using create a list tool and was saved online for documentation.MS Excel was used to filter data and verifying if there are duplicate records.Using the online catalog of NU Library, the titles were searched one by one to find out which is already existing and how many print books & eBook collection need to be added.

Results
From the 86 results, we found out that 30 of them are duplicates.With this data, we deduct 30 from the 86 to get more reliable results.Only 12.5% from the list is part of the existing print collection and 87.5% needs to be added as a potential collection of the School of Mining and Geosciences

Existing collection Potential collection
When it comes to eBook collection, 31 titles are available in the Choice Reviews Online.In that case, we can say that 55% from the list is part of the present eBook collection.It means that in developing the eBook collection, the library needs to purchase 45% (fig 2).Results would show that we need to expand the collection to keep up with the mining and geosciences trend.While we are building the print books collection, we also need to consider expanding the eBooks collection.We can observe that we need more print books (87.5 %) compared to eBooks which we only need 45% of it.Certainly, we cannot deny that both collections have to be developed by Subject Librarians in diverse fields of mining and geosciences.
The table below (Table 1) is an example of select titles from the Choice Reviews recommended list.The table shows the kind of format already available in our collection.However, it only presents a small amount of sample.(Benedetto & Gilmour, 2007).It helps to better understand on how to expand the collection in necessary areas.Furthermore, we continue to evolve the collection based from faculty recommendations and student requests.
(fig 1).Some of the titles we have are Understanding Oil and Gas Shows and Seals in the Search for Hydrocarbons by John Dolson, Earthquake Engineering Handbook edited by Charles Scawthorn & Wai-Fah Chen and Petroleum Geoscience: from Sedimentary Environments to Rock Physics edited by Knut Bjorlykke.Also, the Subject Librarian will be ordering the Earth Book: From the Beginning to the End of Our Planet, 250 Milestones in the History of the Earth Sciences by Jim Bell.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Comparison of print books in the NU collection vs Choice Reviews

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Comparison of eBooks in the NU collection vs Choice Reviews

Table 1 .
Recommended titles by Choice Reviews according to format availability in the NU collectionConclusionsSince the School of Mining and Geosciences is still a developing entity of the university, there is a lot of room for collection development.Subject Librarians must be keen on adding more standardized tools such as Choice Reviews, Resources for College Libraries, Books in Print or Best Books for Academic Libraries.A better collaboration from among the faculty members must also be established to solicit titles to be used as core text or just as part of their supplementary readings.Subject Librarians must also check and identify various resources that are corresponding to encourage research and academic programs of the faculty to recognize which books to purchase.A comprehensive collection development policy can also help improve the collection.To further develop this study, it is recommended to use other tests such as WorldCat Collection Analysis