From Collaborative Purchasing Towards Collaborative Discarding: The Evolution of the Shared Print Repository

Abstract

Academic research libraries have a tradition of collaboration, from selecting foreign language material to licensing electronic resources. Although most storage facilities have tended to be local, some libraries have collaborated on operating shared storage facilities. The growth of digital repositories of printed materials has given the library community the opportunity to engage in a conversation about how to collaboratively take responsibility for the long-term selection and preservation of the print originals. Establishing regional repositories will allow member libraries to draw down local print collections. This review article will trace the major development of this progression from local storage facility to regional print repository.

KEYWORDS:

• print repositories
• storage facilities
• collaborative collection development
• interinstitutional repositories
• strategic drawdown
• preservation
• print overlap
• trust
• faculty attitudes

Notes

1. There are several terms used to describe the systematic and coordinated work between libraries to reduce duplication including shared print repositories, shared print archiving, and collective collections.

2. The discussion of drawing down collections primarily pertains to the large academic research libraries plus a few of the large public libraries; public libraries and smaller academic libraries regularly weed their collections.

3. A search in Librarians Search Portal, Library Literature, and Library and Information Science & Technology Abstracts yielded several hundreds of articles on “collaborative print repositories or depository,” “cooperative print repositories or depositories,” “print storage,” even limiting to articles published in the last 10 years yielded more than 100 articles and reports.

4. The eight are the following:

•	The Northern Regional Library Facility (NRLF), Richmond, CA
•	Southern Regional Library Facility (SRLF), Los Angeles, CA
•	Five-College Library Depository, Amherst, MA
•	CONStor, Newark, OH
•	Washington Research Libraries Consortium (WRLC), Upper Marlboro, MD
•	Research Collections Access and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP), Plainsboro, NJ
•	Southwest Ohio Regional Depository (SWORD), Middletown, OH
•	Library Service Center (LSC), Durham, NC.

5. The six challenges were the following:

1.	Begin to coordinate retrospective activities (Recon/Hybridity)
2.	Transition to digital publishing (Procon/Hybridity)
3.	Collect same core material and divide responsibility for collecting advance material (Core definition/Notification)
4.	Work collectively in relationships with publishers (Publisher relations/Notifications)
5.	Libraries need to distribute responsibilities for archiving low use print material (Archiving/Configuration)
6.	Work with scholars to change the way they disseminate research (Alternative channels of scholarly communication/Configuration)

6. Sam Demas and Wendy Lougee (2011) provided an excellent and concise review of the major models of shared print archives and the challenges in developing a national program.

7. The ReCAP libraries expect to open two additional modules to the facility in 2013. They are currently working on developing processes that will allow them to deduplicate collections.

8. http://www.crl.edu/archiving-preservation/print-archives/papr.

9. Library and Archives Canada has recently started its Modernization project, which addresses at a national level how to collaboratively preserve the national record through both analog and digital preservation (http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/modernization/Pages/default.aspx).

10. The Center for Research Libraries started in 2005 to develop a set of metrics that could be used to audit and certify digital archives, thus increasing their trustworthiness. Since 2009 CRL has also analyzed the repositories of Portico and HathiTrust (http://www.crl.edu/archiving-preservation/digital-archives).