Moderated by Sally Krash from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, “Shared Analysis Tools for Print Retention Programs” featured four speakers who represented geographic diversity as well as diverse experiences.
Emily Stambaugh from the California Digital Library discussed the University of California’s and the Western Regional Storage Trust’s (WEST) shared print journal program. WEST has an information center called AGUA, which enables libraries to develop models of journal retention and manage their retention commitments. AGUA allows members to experiment with scenarios to find overlap with other libraries’ collections and to produce collection comparisons for both print and electronic titles. WEST uses this data to categorize serial titles by risk, prioritizing those titles that are only available in print. WEST can then determine which titles need to be preserved next and ascertain which member libraries have the deepest backfiles and can enter into a retention commitment.
Lizanne Payne, the HathiTrust Shared Print Program Officer, shared how HathiTrust provides an in-house collection analysis tool for its members. HathiTrust is more than a digital repository; it also has a Shared Print Program whereby its member libraries have committed to retain over 16 million monographs. In the first phase of the program, libraries volunteered to serve as retention partners, agreeing to keep and lend certain monographs in their collections. The libraries sent files of their holdings to be matched against HathiTrust. After all bibliographic holdings were compared, the libraries received a file of titles that matched the shared collection and could potentially be weeded. The libraries in turn sent HathiTrust a list of titles which they committed to retain, taking into account existing retention commitments from other programs and consortia. In the next phase, HathiTrust will analyze the collection to get commitments for the titles that were not part of the Phase 1 agreements and complete their coverage.
Susan Stearns is the Executive Director of the Boston Library Consortium, which consists of 18 academic and research libraries. She is also Project Director for the Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust (EAST), a shared print initiative focusing on monographs. EAST’s retention partner libraries agree to keep and loan titles for 15 years, and the group aims to secure a sufficient number of copies of unique and frequently used materials. EAST uses Sustainable Collection Services’ (SCS) GreenGlass product for its members’ collection analysis. SCS performs the data extraction of the libraries’ holdings, and EAST uses the data to run scenarios and develop an equitable model for retention commitments. Member libraries can also access the shared data to compare their collections with each other.
George Machovec, from the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, presented about Gold Rush. Originally designed as an electronic resource management system, Gold Rush includes a MARC record comparison tool which can be used to analyze the overlap of print collections from member libraries. The libraries’ data is ingested at regular intervals using an open source program. Records are matched not on OCLC number but rather on a match key derived from a variety of MARC record fields. Libraries have used the data for weeding decisions, space analysis, and collection development for new programs. Because the data can be exported in XML format, there is great potential for future linked data projects. The tool is only for members, but libraries outside of Colorado can join.
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