Application of Bradford’s law to the evaluation of book collection of library of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre

Evaluation of the collection is a very important step toward the development of good and balanced collection in the library. Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) library is a special scientific research library, which provides exhaustive information in the field of nuclear science and technology and allied fields. In this study, we have used Bradford’s law to evaluate and analyze the book collection of BARC library. A total collection of 94,450 books was considered for the study. The collection was divided into 27 main subject headings with the help of Universal Decimal Classification class numbers. These headings were then considered for analysis of application of Bradford’s law to the collection. The analysis shows that nuclear physics with 14,937 (15.81%) books topped the list followed by nuclear engineering with 12,543 (13.28%) books, chemistry with 11,447 (12.12%) books, medical sciences with 8545 (9.05%) books, and mathematics with 5174 (5.48%) books. These subject headings are then arranged into three Bradford’s zones to find the core subjects of the collection. It shows that nuclear physics and nuclear engineering are the Ist zone that is, core subject areas of the collection, which are actually of a major interest to the parent organization that is, BARC. The subject areas when arranged according to the Bradford’s zones the ratio of zones was observed as 2:5:20 (1:n:n2). This ratio shows that BARC library book collection almost obeys the Bradford’s law. In this analysis, we also tried to draw the Bradford’s curve for the book collection, which almost matched to the ‘S’ shaped Bradford’s curve.