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. With the tighter budgets, there is more of a need to track the use of materials and to ensure the library is properly responding to changes in the curriculum. Furthermore, many libraries are moving towards more automation of their acquisitions or relying more on patron driven plans. The need to assess how approval plans or other acquisition models are able to adjust to curricular change is largely unknown. In this paper, we will demonstrate a method of how to use Library of Congress Collection Policy Statements to index curricular changes and how to map those LOC subject terms to our Integrated Library System and electronic resource holdings. Once mapped, we will show how the curricular changes data can be compared to with any library collection data. Our analysis would be beneficial to collection managers and collection development librarians who want to retrospectively review curricular changes to determine if the change had any effect on library collections. We will show sample data reports from AU Library's holdings to demonstrate how this method can be used to analyze purchasing and usage data over time.
