Greetings - I am coordinating a two-year project at the University of Virginia that is assessing all of the Library's Special Collections holdings (nearly 14,000 collections). The project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Virginia Historical Society is working on a similar project. As part of our assessment, we are attempting to establish a "research value" for each collection, to assist with setting priorities for future preservation, conservation, and re-housing. Specifically, we are attempting to identify how these collections support current and future "research trends" in numerous subject areas. We are interested in the condition, quality, and quantity of our holdings that have received considerable prior attention, are gaining currency, or have the potential to attract significant researcher interest. For the purposes of this project, a research trend is a specific area of study within an established academic discipline that is increasingly visible in journal and book publications, dissertations, and grants applied for and/or received. While we are interested in research trends, broadly understood, we also want to pay special attention to the presence of those trends locally. We are attempting to develop methodologies for recognizing research trends. I and my research assistant will be consulting dissertation proposals and publications (at UVA and elsewhere), journal and book publications, faculty publications (including books published by faculty at UVA over the past five years), and grant proposals. We will survey the table of contents for the five (5) top journals in each of the designated disciplines to identify trends in article publication. So that we are sure to identify the trends most salient to the evaluation of our collections, we will focus on those areas of study that correspond to our holdings. At the end of the day, we will attempt to identify a causal link between research trends and usage. We want to be able to support our inference that the research trends we pinpoint will have a bearing on the collections? employment. We may gather similar, although possibly more limited, data on research trends (in the manner discussed above) for a five/ten year period five years ago. We will then look at the correlation between older trends and current usage. From there, we will make an inference about the directional relationship and make a case for the extrapolation we engage in when predicting future usage. I would be interested in hearing from VA-HIST and VA-ROOTS subscribers about this project. Do you have any thoughts about how to identify research trends? How about for Virginia history and family history research? Are you working within other disciplines, and if so, do you have any thoughts about how to identify research trends in those areas? Here are the broad subject areas we are using to classify our collections in the internal database we are creating. In addition to the broad headings, we are also adding qualifiers that identify materials in the collections that relate to Thomas Jefferson, UVA, Civil War, African Americans, Native Americans, and Women: Arts, Architecture, Music and Humanities Business Civil Rights Education Genealogy and Family History Health and Medicine Legal Local and Urban History Military Politics Religion and Church History Sciences and Engineering Sports and Recreation Civil War Korean War Revolutionary War Spanish-American War Vietnam War War of 1812 World War I World War II I would be interested in any thoughts you might have about our approach, or insights into research trends you might have personally identified in any of our broad topics or our qualifiers. Thank you! Elizabeth -- Elizabeth Roderick, Director Mellon Special Collections Assessment Project The University of Virginia [log in to unmask] (434) 982-2980 To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html