MCLS and SCS

Remember these two acronyms: MCLS and SCS.

MCLS Offices in Lansing

Midwest Collaborative for Library Services (MCLS), based in Lansing, Michigan, provides libraries in Michigan and Indiana with a range of services, from group licensing and training to convening and facilitation. And in this case -- innovation.

  Sustainable Collection Services (SCS)-- based in Contoocook, New Hampshire; Watertown, Massachusetts; Portland, Oregon; and with major operations in the cloud -- provides decision-support tools and services for deselection and shared print collection management. And in this case -- innovation.

Over the past six months, SCS and MCLS have collaborated on a unique pilot project: developing a shared print monographs program across seven Michigan academic libraries. Print book collections in these pilot libraries vary in size, from 160,000 to nearly 1.2 million titles. Participants are small, medium, and large state universities, including one ARL library. Some are confronting immediate space problems; some are not. But all seven libraries see long-term value in collaborative management of print book collections. In alphabetical order, these forward-looking libraries from the Wolverine State are:

Central Michigan University
Eastern Michigan University
Grand Valley State University
Michigan Technological University
Saginaw Valley State University
Wayne State University
Western Michigan University

You'll be hearing a lot about this project and these libraries in the coming months, and for good reason. MCLS and SCS have pioneered -- and implemented -- a practical shared management solution for low-use print monographs.

Working closely with SCS to compile and analyze their combined collections data, the MCLS pilot group identified 534,000 low-circulation 'title-holdings' to be considered for withdrawal from their collective shelves. (A title-holding is SCS terminology for a library-specific holding of a title held by multiple pilot libraries.) For these same titles, 2 title-holdings of each will be retained within the group. The 534,000 allocable withdrawal candidates were identified based on these criteria:

• 3 or fewer circulations since 1999
• Held by 3 or more pilot libraries
• Published or added before 2005

Allocation of withdrawal candidates (and corresponding assignment of retention commitments) among seven libraries proved a complex process. The desire to withdraw title-holdings with the fewest circulations had to be balanced against the withdrawal targets of those libraries needing space immediately. The relative size of collections also had to be factored in. Equity had to be defined and assured. After 15 iterations (!), SCS established an allocation algorithm that largely satisfied these objectives. (We'll be protecting *that* like the original formula for Coke!)

SCS is now producing lists of withdrawal candidates and retention commitments for each library. The lists will be completed by mid-March, and pilot libraries will be free to act on both fronts, in tandem with the Memorandum of Understanding now under construction. In its simplest terms, this project represents a clear example of the power of collaboration on shared print book collections. Working together provided both more collection security and more opportunity for withdrawals than any library acting alone.

This project was initially suggested by Doug Way, Head of Collections at Grand Valley State University. His idea surfaced after a standalone SCS  deselection project at GVSU, when it became obvious that cooperative action within Michigan would lead to a more comprehensive and stable regional solution. Randy Dykhuis, Executive Director of MCLS, agreed to solicit participants, mediate business arrangements and provide coordination, communication, and facilitation. SCS agreed to undertake development of the requisite tools, data,  and services, and in July 2011 began loading data from all seven libraries.

We have learned a great deal in the intervening months. MCLS, the pilot libraries, and SCS all plan to speak and write about the process and results. [Contact us if you're interested in a presentation.] While we faced several operational and organizational challenges. we have mostly wrestled those to the ground. With minor reservations and many ideas for improvement, all parties consider this phase of the project a success. We are eager to tell the story, and help other groups move forward. For now, a few highlights:

• 3.8 million bib records, plus circulation and item data, were extracted from two different ILS systems, loaded to SCS servers, normalized, and compared to WorldCat & HathiTrust.

• Comparable circulation data existed for an 11-year period: 1999-2011. 1.74 million title-holdings (46%) did not circulate during that time. Normalization of circulation data is a major challenge.

• 1.36 million unique titles (36%) were held by the group. Even the smallest library held more than 40,000 unique titles.

• 989,000 titles (26%) were held by 4 or more pilot participants.

• 2.36 million (62%) title-holdings showed more than 100 WorldCat holdings. 2.93 million (77%) showed more than 50 WorldCat holdings.

• 1.57 million (41%) title-holdings were HathiTrust in-copyright titles. 131,00 (3%) were HathiTrust public domain titles.

This data, combined and recombined in various ways, allowed MCLS pilot libraries to gauge the impact of different deselection scenarios. The group has proceeded cautiously but steadily, breaking a new trail for themselves and others who decide to follow. Group decisions have occurred relatively quickly, in part because the choices rest on clear data. (This is especially encouraging, since this was an ad hoc group, formed specifically for this project.)

We experienced (and at times created) data errors, but each in turn has been corrected, clarified, or restated as necessary. There are still policy issues to be worked through, especially around retention commitments. But together, MCLS, the pilot libraries, and SCS have made solid progress in creating an infrastructure for the shared management of print monographs.

The whole project has been and continues to be a remarkably pleasant experience. So, from the Granite State, the Bay State, and the Beaver State (components of the virtual SCS organization) to our collaborators in the Wolverine State, we say thank you for living up to Michigan's motto: "Si Quaeris Peninsulam Amoenam Circumspice" ;-) Or to paraphrase the translation of another Latin saying on behalf of the MCLS-SCS enterprise: 'We came. We crunched. We concurred.' We look forward to the next steps.

Data with Benefits

Initial batch data extract from library

Sustainable Collection Services (SCS), the company I run with three business partners, provides decision-support for print monographs deselection. SCS processes are built on data and batch processing. We first import the library's bibliographic, item, and circulation data. That data is then normalized, cleansed, and compared to other data sets such as HathiTrust, WorldCat, peer libraries, and authoritative lists. Library-defined rules then operate against the resulting superset of data, enabling selectors or administrators to gauge the effect of different deselection criteria. Ultimately, candidate lists for withdrawal and preservation are produced.

That is the service we planned to build. It is the service we actually have built and applied to numerous library projects over the past year. But it turns out to be only part of our business. Working with large monographs data sets also creates opportunities for validation, remediation, analysis, and batch processing. Initially, we regarded these as side benefits. Now we are beginning to think of them as integral to the overall SCS service. Consider some simple examples:

• Missing or Invalid OCLC Control Numbers: It is fairly common for some portion of a library's cataloging records to lack OCLC numbers. In other cases, those numbers may be truncated or malformed. For records without valid OCLC numbers, SCS uses a combination of LCCN and string-similarity matching to identify likely record matches and corresponding control numbers. These can be returned to the library in a batch to enable update of its catalog. 

• OCLC Holdings Not Set: As SCS queries the WorldCat API to look up summary and peer holdings, it becomes apparent that in some cases the library's own holding has not been set. We can report these instances to the library, and produce a list that enables batch holdings update--sort of a miniature reclamation project.

• Profile of a Group Collection: In one recent project with a pilot group of seven libraries, SCS identified uniquely-held titles for each participant, as well as the degree of overlap on all others. Combined with corresponding circulation data, this enabled identification of a sweet spot for shared print commitments. There are many possibilities in this area.

• Print/E-Book Overlap: Provided SCS has a library's records for both print and electronic books, it is increasingly possible to determine whether a low-circulation print title is also held as an e-book. There are many caveats here (e.g., it may be important to distinguish whether the e-book is owned, rather than simply available as part of a package or a patron-driven acquisition record). But this overlap is of interest to many libraries.

• FRBR-on/FRBR-off: Edition matching is a critical element of deselection and collection analysis. For archiving and preservation purposes, exact matches are imperative. For user purposes, exact matches are sometimes important and sometimes not. SCS holdings lookups start with FRBR groupings off, a conservative approach that assures edition-specific matches. For titles that return few holdings, we then re-run the lookups with FRBR groupings on, returning these "softer" matches to the library for review.

• Batch Processing Support: Deselection projects create record maintenance work, regardless of whether titles will be transferred or withdrawn. Some record maintenance steps (e.g., suppression, location changes) can be completed as batch processes, based on lists that include local control numbers and necessary data elements. Often, SCS can produce labor-saving lists of this sort from the data we hold. 

Remediated batch of data enroute to library...

In each project, we encounter additional opportunities to derive new value from the data. In shared print projects, for instance, it will increasingly prove useful to highlight retention commitments as well as withdrawal opportunities. These are most efficiently handled as batch processes. As always, we are limited only by the data itself and our own creativity. We will continue to look for more ways to benefit from the effort that goes into deselection projects. Some solutions may be partial in scope, but in a large data set even partial solutions can save many hours of staff time.

Bibliometrics and Book Retention

As I've stated in other contexts, selection and deselection represent the same intellectual activity, performed at different points in a book's lifecycle. Deselection has one significant advantage, though. It can be based on a track record of circulation, in-house use, and appearance on authoritative lists. We began to explore yet another type of historical evidence in a previous post on The Impact of Books: citation counts. Although it seems reasonable to presume that the number of citations to a book would correlate with discovery and use, we need a deeper understanding of the underlying dynamics. Highly-cited books seem likely to be important books, books worth keeping, books more likely to be wanted in future.

Bibliometrics "uses quantitative analysis or statistics to describe patterns of publication within a given field or body of literature." Not surprisingly, bibliometric techniques originated in the hard sciences and in the journal literature, but they are now used in many disciplines and increasingly on monographs. Historically, citation analysis has been used to evaluate researchers and departments, and to gauge the impact of a contribution to its discipline. Our purposes are related but somewhat narrower. We are seeking to identify high-impact books within a discipline to assure that they are retained. Can bibliometrics help identify these titles? What can citation patterns tell us about how intellectual content ages in specific disciplines?

Conceptually, this turns out to be a rich vein. and the literature and data run deep. Consider some of these potential data points:

• Total number of citations: a straightforward measure of citation frequency. However, it may be useful to distinguish between journal-to-book citations and book-to-book citations. The former can be easily (though partially) retrieved through journal indexes. The latter are beginning to be identified using Google Books and Hathi Trust, but at present are largely unavailable.

• Average citation frequency: Number of citations per monograph in a discipline. Used to compare activity among disciplines.

• Citation peak: date after publication at which the maximum number of citations occur.

• Noncitation ratio or Uncitedness Index: absence of citations in a defined time period.

• Price's Index (citation recency): "calculates the proportion of the number of citations no more than five years old over the total number of citations an item receives."

• Half-life of citations: a measure of "obsolescence" of scholarly literature, obtained by "subtracting the publication year of source documents from the median publication year of citing documents."

• Reference decay: the point after which 90 % of citations to a work occur.

There are obvious implications here for monographs deselection and retention. These measures provide one kind of insight into the impact and staying power of individual works. They also enable identification of content aging patterns at the disciplinary level, especially when examined by the periods of "knowledge diffusion" or "intellectual acceptance" developed by Lindholm-Romantschuk and Warner (in "The Role of Monographs in Scholarly Communication: An Empirical Study of Philosophy, Sociology and Economics"). These periods are:

• Initial Reception: "the period of three calendar years from publication (including the year of publication).

• Intellectual Survival: the number of years after initial reception that a book continues to be cited.

In an eye-opening 2008 article entitled "Citation Characteristics and Intellectual Acceptance of Scholarly Monographs" Professor Rong Tang of Simmons College employs a number of these concepts to "explore disciplinary difference in the citing of books." Her work centers on 750 randomly selected monographs, 125 each in Religion, History, Psychology, Economics, Math, and Physics. The study seeks to answer two research questions:

"Are there significant domain or disciplinary differences in the distribution of citations to monographs, half-lives, and Price's Index?"

"If conditioned on the periods of intellectual acceptance, are there significant differences among disciplines in terms of citation frequency and number of books cited per period?"

The article presents its methods, concepts, and results clearly. It is well worth reading in its entirety. The table reproduced below begins to show the potential variability across disciplines:

Rong Tang, "Citation Characteristics and Intellectual Acceptance of Scholarly Monographs"

Some of its more surprising results include:

• Psychology received the highest number of citations, with more than 6,000 and an average of 48.1 citations per monograph, followed by math and physics. History received an average of 3.2 citations per item.

• Physics has the longest half-life, while humanities disciplines have the shortest.

• The highest uncitedness ratios occurred in history (52%) and Religion (59%).

• "...the peak time of citations for six disciplines all occurred within the first 20 years of publication."

• "Religion and history reached their highest citation amount within the first five years...whereas psychology, physics and mathematics did not receive their citation heyday until more than six years after publication."

• Citations of most disciplines increase at six years after publication. "The highest potential period of intellectual acceptance is the first 10 years, with the decline and gradual ending of citations during the 11th to 30th years...

It will take time and experimentation to evaluate to determine how applicable some of these ideas and findings may be to book retention decisions. The results need to be qualified: the sample size was small; it considers only article-to-book citations, not book-to-book citations, which may under-represent humanities citations. But the article provides an excellent foundation. A hearty thanks to Professor Tang and predecessors for providing this useful framework.

The Impact of Books

Effect of heavily-cited monograph

During a recent monographs deselection project, an astute librarian inquired whether a book's "impact factor" -- the number of times it has been cited in other books or journals -- might be invoked as a title protection rule. Impact factor, of course, is a concept much more highly developed for journals and conference proceedings than for monographs. Often described as a quantitative tool for evaluating journals, impact factor captures the frequency with which an article has been cited in a three-year period. At the journal title level, it captures the average number of citations per paper. Results are published annually in Journal Citation Reports. While not without controversy as a performance metric, impact factor is widely used as a shorthand indicator of article and journal quality.

Recently, an impact factor for books has begun to receive some overdue attention. In late 2011, Thomson Reuters introduced the Book Citation Index, available through its Web of Knowledge platform. Despite its bold taglines of "putting books back into the library" and "completing the research picture", it represents a fairly modest beginning. By December 2011, it was projected to include 30,000 titles, with a plan to add 10,000 per year. The Thomson Reuters site describes a careful selection process, and highlights improved discovery and citation navigation as the Index's primary attributes. But there is a clear implication that these are important monographs in their respective fields.
   

This implication is not without controversy. Metrics such as citation analysis raise the hackles of some researchers, especially in the humanities and social sciences, as shown in a lively exchange of comments following this article from Times Higher Education: "Monographs finally join citations database."  On October 13/14, 2011, a Mr Flannigan let it be known that:

"The field of citation counting isn't a 'field' in any intellectual sense. It's a shortcut; an attempt to evade engagement with intellectual content and reduce everything to the logic of a spreadsheet."

 "I don't doubt that some disciplines might benefit from citation counting. But I'm sick of scientists imposing their methods onto non-cognate disciplines and demanding that everyone else fall into line."

Several recent articles further explore book and even chapter-level impact using sources other than BCI. "Assessing the citation impact of books: the role of Google Books, Google Scholar, and Scopus", published in November 2011, examines whether these databases can provide "alternative sources of citation evidence", and specifically looks at references to and from books. Planned data mining of the Hathi Trust corpus may open up some new avenues. A 2006 account of a pilot project for the Australian Council for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences tests the extension of citation analysis to books in history and political science:

Source:Linda Butler, Council for the Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences

 
We'll follow up on these and other recent works on "bibliometrics" in a subsequent post. (Mark your calendars for that!) For now, let's assume that book impact factors are worth some consideration in decisions about storage, withdrawal, and retention.

As monographs are considered for deselection, there is often a desire to exempt titles that appear on "authoritative" lists or core lists, regardless of whether those titles have been used. Examples include titles listed in Resources for College Libraries or as CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles, or on discipline-specific accreditation lists. Clearly, titles listed in the Book Citation Index could fall into this category, and might be considered candidates for retention irrespective of other considerations, even as the debate about citation analysis continues.

There is one very practical problem, however. Book Citation Index, as currently constituted, is limited to books with copyright dates in the current year plus 5 previous years in the Sciences, and current year plus 7 previous years in Social Sciences and Humanities. As this is written in early 2012, then, coverage includes:

• Sciences: books published in 2007 or later
• Social Sciences & Humanities: books published in 2005 or later

To date, deselection criteria in the projects supported by our firm Sustainable Collection Services have focused on titles published or acquired before 2005--sometimes much earlier. The universe of titles being considered for withdrawal and the universe of most-cited titles in Book Citation Index at present do not overlap at all. For now, impact factor simply cannot play a role in deselection decisions. The relevant data does not yet exist in any consolidated form.

As the list of titles grows over time, it will become more relevant. But the role of book impact factor in deselection will emerge only as titles published in 2005 and later begin to appear on withdrawal candidate lists. The utility of the impact factor will grow incrementally; under the Book Citation Index model, 10,000 additional titles will be available for analysis each year. In five or ten years, this may be an important data point. But not quite yet. In fact, it may not be necessary at all, since presumably highly-cited books would tend to receive more use. And in deselection decisions, use trumps most other considerations.

Browsing Now (2)

Browsing and serendipity are not limited to the book stacks. Skimming and scanning are habits of mind, and can lead to unexpected discoveries anywhere. Like millions of other people, I use Twitter to bring a mix of relevant and entertaining content to my attention. While Twitter's brief messages and links rarely include books, they do provide a loosely-shaped browsing experience that often leads to useful information I might not find otherwise.

On January 12th, 2012, a small snapshot of my Twitter feed included the following.

@lorcanD: "NYT Windows phone app is very nice, while the Guardian's is lazy."

@ChuckProphet [musician]: "Sometimes Christians are so mean."

@GreatDismal [author]: "Signed Hungarian completist's amazing collection of my work in Hungarian. Many rarities I hadn't seen before."

@GreatDismal: "Sorry I wasn't tooled up to sign tablets." (A problem later rectified--above).

@latimes: "James Joyce moves into the public domain, mostly." [link]

@lorcanD: "the future of collections and collections management. interesting pres by Caroline Brazier of BL. ppt" [link to powerpoint]

In less than a minute, I gleaned several unexpected thoughts (autographing books is changing), developments ("Joyce's unpublished work, particularly his letters, will [now] be available to scholars"), questions (there are people who use Windows phones?) and two substantive links, without actively searching for any of them. Echoing David Weinberger's characterization of the web, these were "small pieces, loosely joined."

So browsing itself continues to advance and morph, as do the formats and content found. Pictures, news blogs, opinions, observations by interesting artists, even an occasional book. But the prize of this day's group of links proved to be the slides from Caroline Brazier's presentation on "Collect/connect: the future of collections and collections management." It's a substantive exposition of the changes facing libraries, prepared to inform the British Library's 10-year strategy. But it also showcases some additional attributes of professional information and grey literature in the early 21st century. Ms. Brazier's work is:

• Timely. Delivered on October 27, 2011 in Adelaide, Australia.
• Authoritative. Authored by the Director of Scholarship & Collections at the British Library.
• Linked from a trusted source. Lorcan Dempsey's tweets regularly turn up interesting targets, indicating context and format.
• Topical. Future of tangible and digital collections, curating a discovery layer.
• Graphical. 39 slides with minimal text. Images, tables, and graphs drive the message. (Grey literature a true misnomer here!)
• Freely available. Like a library. Amazing how much valuable content fits this description.
• Multi-media. A full MP3 audio is available to accompany the slides.
• Easy to share. Links, extracts, copies.
• Useful. A powerful new graphic for thinking about shared print.

A browsing nugget, January 12, 2012

• Discovered serendipitously. Scrolling through dozens of unrelated entries, far from the book stacks, far from the library.

Browsing Now

Browsing in the stacks

At some point in almost any discussion of weeding, storage, or shared print, concern about browsing surfaces. If large portions of the print collection are withdrawn, moved to offsite storage, or are held only in other libraries, in-stacks browsing will be disrupted. A rich possibility for serendipitous discovery will be eliminated. If books are not co-located, opportunities and connections may be missed. Scholars in the humanities, in particular, regard the library collection as their "laboratory", and are often vocal in their opposition to any plan that requires physical relocation of books. A good example of these strong feelings comes from an article entitled "In Face of Professors' 'Fury', Syracuse U. Library Will Keep Books On Shelves," which appeared in the November 12, 2009 issue of the Chronicle for Higher Education:

"The reaction was so fierce because of the high value humanities researchers still place on hands-on browsing, Mr. Watts said. "The big issue in the letters and among humanists generally is the importance of being able to browse collections and not have them in a remote location."

Begin here, circa 1975

Personally, I can't count the number of times I've benefited from unexpected proximity. Serendipitous discovery can be both surprising and satisfying. While a student at the University of New Hampshire in the 1970s, I would copy down the call number of a title I needed, and head to the stacks. Once in the designated area, my reverse introduction into the mysteries of LC classification and Cuttering began. More than once, I found something more interesting or relevant in the surrounding volumes than what I originally sought. This was especially helpful when my target item was not actually on the shelf. The loose and at times arbitrary-seeming aggregation of books by subject presented me with options I might not have discovered without physical browsing, especially in the days of card catalogs. 

But I sometimes found myself impeded and mystified by the same cataloging practices that rewarded my browsing. Why were Thomas Merton's 'Raids on the Unspeakable' and 'My Argument with the Gestapo' lodged on the 5th floor in PS 3525 while his 'New Seeds of Contemplation' and 'Asian Journal' resided on the 4th floor in BX 2350? I put it down to the perils of being a monk and a poet simultaneously. I did occasionally wonder about his accidental shelf neighbors in both realms, like Robert Merton or Henri Nouwen. This system certainly fostered serendipity and even curiosity, but not entirely as the result of , ah, intelligent design.

The insistence on maintaining browsable physical collections in open stacks overstates the value of what has always been a partial and complementary research strategy. The largest and best libraries do not hold every work on a subject; access to other collections is needed, and that access relies on bibliographic data rather than direct examination. Even in a single library, books and journals on the same topic are typically separated, with unified discovery supported through bibliographies, indexes, and databases. And physical browsing is actually a very recent phenomenon. Closed stacks were a mainstay of academic libraries until the middle of the 20th century. As Donald A. Barclay, Deputy University Librarian at the University of California, Merced, noted in an American Libraries blog entry, entitled "The Myth of Browsing:" 

Prior to the Second World War, the typical academic library was neither designed nor managed to support the browsing of collections. At best, faculty might be allowed to browse, but it was the rare academic library that allowed undergraduates into the stacks.

And of course browsing and unexpected discovery are not limited to the book stacks. In double-checking my memories from the 1970s, today's UNH online catalog provided search results sortable by call number,  enabling an instant virtual scan of the the shelves around my Thomas Merton titles. Those shelves are 50 miles from where I sit. In many respects, the ability to browse online is superior to in-stacks browsing. I could follow author and subject links, range beyond the UNH catalog to consult the combined collections of the Boston Library Consortium orWorldCat, scan tables of contents, and in general follow trails that would not have been open to me while walking the aisles. This sort of browsing in the cloud is not the same as browsing in the stacks, but does offer many of the same advantages, some new ones, and a good deal more convenience. (They don't call Firefox a browser for nothing.)

Browsing in the cloud

The current tools for online browsing are far from perfect. Online browsing is only one component of a research strategy. But it may be (or may be developed as) a reasonable stand-in for in-stacks browsing, especially as libraries add more and more eBook titles. As economic pressures and user preference for electronic content grow, libraries must reconsider the value of onsite print collections. In most cases, this will mean smaller collections in central stacks, and remote access to lesser-used materials. While this may limit physical browsing, it does not preclude serendipity or scanning for connections. These result from the openness and imagination of users, and will persist regardless of how information is stored. Rather than insisting on all books remaining in situ, we may be better served by adapting our browsing proclivities to new tools.

Meet the Press

The act of removing books from library shelves carries a shocking load of emotional and cultural baggage. Academic libraries are seen as guardians of the published record, and more specifically the printed record. To most library users (and to a good share of librarians), books are the DNA of a beloved institution--the core of its identity. At some fundamental level, deselection appears to betray that identity and its corresponding cultural commitment.

Image and article  from Cracked.com

But while the printed book remains a vital part of scholarly and cultural communication, it is painfully obvious that its primacy has been eclipsed by electronic resources. Use of books is far lower than most people realize. Millions of redundant volumes are sitting untouched in open stacks and storage facilities. They occupy space and time that could be used for other purposes. As a professional community, we have a responsibility to address this, even in the face of misunderstanding and resistance.

But we also need to explain our thinking and our actions. We need to educate faculty, students, administrators, and even library staff about deselection. As with any difficult topic, effective communication about weeding, storage, and shared print decisions requires not only mastery of the relevant data, but direct engagement with concerns and objections. We need to manage the message as actively as we manage the decision-making and logistics. We need to provide context. And we need to take the initiative.

The temptation to hide or downplay deselection projects can be quite strong, since this activity is often perceived so negatively. Deselection can attract close scrutiny, inflammatory language, television cameras, and protests. Stories and misunderstandings abound, but let's start with a big one that occurred 15 years ago.

In the October 14, 1996 issue of The New Yorker, author Nicholson Baker confronted San Francisco Public Library about books removed after retrospective conversion of the library's catalog. The article, entitled "The Author Vs. The Library" [abstract], set an adversarial tone and engendered suspicion around motives and practices for removing library material--suspicion that persists to this day. Some of that suspicion is warranted. We need watchdogs. We also need to be clear about why some books must be withdrawn. We need to assure that criteria for weeding are well-founded, and that the process is sufficiently transparent. We need to articulate the problem, the solution, and the benefits.

Baker attacked when he learned that 200,000 books had been sent to landfills. There were unusual aspects to this case, and clearly some questionable decisions made in haste. But even Baker's informants from the library agreed that "maybe a quarter of them, fifty thousand, should have been thrown out." And while the article teems with examples of potentially valuable discarded titles, those lists provide no context. No consideration is given to circulation rates, to how many other libraries hold these works, to a title's relevance to the Library's mission, or to the cost of retention. (Digital versions were not a significant factor in 1996.) In short, the picture as sketched by Baker was incomplete.

It is our task as responsible librarians to fill in the background and to complete that picture. In some cases, even good books (or rather, surplus copies of good books) may warrant weeding and discard. We need to get better at making the case and showing that no content will be lost. We need to welcome the press and make our decisions/criteria transparent. In subsequent posts, we will look at some libraries that have handled these aspects of deselection especially well. But for today, let's recall some good practical advice from an academic library that pursued a major weeding and storage project between 1995 and 2002. Virginia Tech must have been all too aware of Nicholson Baker's piece as they removed 100,000 volumes each year between 1996 and 1998.

In the May 2005 issue of The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Paul Metz and Caryl Gray looked back on that experience, and offered their "Perspectives on... Public Relations and Library Weeding" [WorldCat record]. This article is an excellent short synthesis of what the Library learned about communicating with its community before, during, and after its massive deselection project. Metz and Gray's advice focuses on six key topics:

• Advance Publicity: Consulting faculty 'early and often' is critical. For example, "An article published in the Spectrum, a faculty/staff newsletter, presented an overview of the shelf-load problem, outlined the strategies that would be employed, and invited academic departments to participate in the process."

• Clear Criteria: "The criteria and guidelines for the project were shared with interested faculty members and an opportunity to review items selected for discard was offered."

• Flexibility: "The Libraries expressed its willingness to transfer storage items back to campus" [...] "A library's willingness to allow visitors to come to the Storage building and examine items on site is another important and beneficial element in flexibility."

• Good Deeds: "...[the English bibliographer] listed discards she thought would be of interest and offered them for transfer to the department. By the end of the project 4016 books had been sent to several members of the department."

• Quick Response from the Top: "The [Director of Collection Development] answered all questions immediately. [...] With many critics it helped to give tangible examples..." [...] "Who would want a book on personal finance that predates the personal computer and spreadsheets?"

• Low Visibility: "...it was the Library's commitment to recycling that invited its greatest public relations challenge. Rather than send our discards to a landfill, we held them in a dumpster behind the library. The unfortunate result was that "dumpster divers" would periodically remove items and express their disapproval of the Library's decisions." [...] "After several months, the dean of Libraries decided that the 'dumpster situation' was untenable and directed that all library discards be included in the university's periodic surplus property sale." [Related post]

As is clear from these brief statements, even the best communications plans require extensive groundwork and vigilance. Despite all the preparation, a letter entitled "Tech Is Treating Unwanted Books Like Garbage" appeared in the Roanoke Times and World News. But because they were prepared, the Director of Collection Management responded within 4 days, providing corrections and context, and advancing the Library's rationale. In the end, Virginia Tech considers their project "a success. The Libraries still benefit from the enormous gains in shelf space. [...] The project is very rarely mentioned by faculty or other members of the university and seems almost to have been forgotten."