Medium-Density Storage

Last week, at the invitation of Diane Graves, University Librarian at Trinity University in San Antonio, I spent two days in Texas to talk about shared print books and deselection. Day one consisted of discussions with some Humanities faculty at Trinity, followed by a day at the Texas Council of Academic Libraries meeting in Austin. People say that everything is bigger in Texas, and the jumbotron screen at the conference center certainly proved that point. Between the fine Mexican food and the buzz of passing by Scherz, Texas (Steve Earle's hometown) with a Doug Sahm song running through my head, it was a pretty fine trip.

TAMU/UTS Joint Library Facility

As luck would have it, I even learned a few things, from an interesting presentation on the Texas A&M / University of Texas System Joint Library Facility. The JLF opened in May 2013, and has recently begun to ingest books and journals--just under 70,000 to date, in a facility designed to hold one million volumes. Presenters Pixey Anne Mosley (Associate Dean for Administrative & Faculty Services at Texas A&M Libraries) and Wyoma van Duinkerken (Director of the JLF) described the evolution of the facility, highlighting a few concepts that were new, at least to me:

• A medium-density facility: Shelving is 19 feet high, rather than the 30 feet that characterizes high-density facilities. This eliminates the need for additional sprinklers and helps control costs. I didn't think Texas did 'medium' anything, but there you have it.

• Climate controls that mimic open stacks: Rather than 59 degrees and humidity-controlled, the JLF temperature is kept at 68% and there are no humidity controls. The idea is that these conditions are as good as most library stacks, and keep operating costs down. Both universities have other storage facilities that are climate-controlled.

• Resource-in-Common (RIC): Via this concept, materials sent to the JLF become shared state property. Claiming RIC status for a title requires withdrawing one local shelf copy and updating the record with JLF location and OCLC symbol (JLF has its own symbol), and barcode information.

• Clear and sensible policies: No duplicates. No government documents. Want good copy but not necessary to identify "best" copy. Items cannot be withdrawn or permanently relocated (e.g., back to campus). This collection is meant to be counted on.

The TAMU/UTS approach strikes a different balance than I've seen in other places. The emphasis is on reasonably good conditions for housing a single copy of books to be shared--at a reasonable cost. It fills a niche somewhere between what I have previously described as 'archive copies' and 'service copies.' It uses a single copy to do a bit of both, at a cost of $.40 per volume per year -- less than half of the $.86 per volume per year that Courant & Nielsen calculated for high-density storage. The JLF is not fully optimized for either preservation or delivery, but makes a reasonable effort at both. For print materials that may not be much in demand, this may be a very cost-effective solution at this scale.

Oh, and as for that jumbotron at the AT &T Conference Center, check it out.

You really don't want a typo on your slide at this scale!

Do BookBots Dream of Virtual Browse?

As I talk with librarians about the future of local print collections, one question surfaces with some regularity: what's the best or boldest strategy you've seen? While regional shared print projects such as the Michigan Shared Print Initiative (MI-SPI), the Maine Shared Collection Strategy provide one type of solution, individual library responses can also prove quite inspiring. One such project stands out in my mind: North Carolina State University's BookBot and Virtual Browse.

Prompted by a renovation of its main library, NC State fundamentally rethought its use of space and the role of its print collections. The Library's new vision conceived the renovated Hunt Library as "a major competitive advantage for the university." Further, the planners sought "the ability for our students, faculty, and partners to immerse themselves in interactive computing, multi-media creation, and large-scale visualization" -- tasks not immediately associated with print collections. NCSU also sought to double its seating capacity for users.

Still, the NCSU Libraries remain the custodian of a multi-million volume collection of print materials, and in their planning embraced that role in an eminently practical way.

A BookBot--a robotically-served high-density, climate-controlled repository--was incorporated into the design. With a capacity of 2 million volumes, the BookBot enabled NCSU to reduce the space allocated to print collections without reducing collection size. They retained a physically browsable collection of about 40,000 volumes, moving everything else to the BookBot.

NCSU is certainly not the first library to adopt this approach. Cal State Northridge holds the distinction of implementing the first robotically-served space integrated with its library, back in 1992. Other libraries, including UNLV, University of Utah, Colgate, and Valparaiso, have incorporated Automated Storage & Retrieval Systems (ASRS) with good results. The key is rapid delivery of items in the BookBot; NCSU's standard is 5 minutes from the user submitting a request.

Virtual Browse - Serendipity Restored!

But NCSU has raised the game to a new level by incorporating Virtual Browse capability. This addresses one of the major objections to high-density storage, regardless of whether it's remote or attached to the library: the inability to scan scan the surrounding material on the shelves. Virtual Browse provides an excellent alternative: a graphical interface that uses cover scans, tables of contents, and bibliographic records to their fullest potential.

Take a look at this short video: Virtual Browse is demonstrated around the 1:40 mark. NCSU's combination of high-density storage, rapid retrieval, and virtual browse set a new standard for interacting with increasingly low-use print collections.

 
Yes, it's expensive and probably not for every library. But as regional shared print service centers become more common, development costs can be amortized over a group of libraries and users provided with a window into offsite collections as well as onsite collections. It's an investment that applies the full power of current discovery tools while allowing print collections to be managed more efficiently and in a smaller footprint.

Farewell to Alexandria Revisited

"What has been will be again; what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." --Ecclesiastes 1:9 (New International Version)

Last June, I made a presentation on "Rethinking Library Resources" to the Academic Libraries of Indiana. Among other fine moments that day, I met David Lewis, Dean of the IUPUI University Library and an author whose "From the Stacks to the Web: The Transformation of Academic Library Collecting" I had been citing in my presentations. Over lunch, he recommended that I chase down a book from the 1970s called Farewell to Alexandria. [WorldCat record] [Hathi Trust record] Once again I found myself purchasing a copy of a book that had been withdrawn from a library, this time from the Moody Bible Institute, which doubtless inspired the quote above. [Amazon record]. In a sign that the used book market struggles (much as libraries do, though in different terms) to establish the value of a work, this title remains available at prices ranging from $1.98 to $176.61.

If you are of a certain age, cast your mind back to 1975, a full 38 years ago. (If you are not of a certain age, well, good for you. Trust your elders on this.) The library profession was near the end of an unprecedented building boom. Between 1967-1974, "about 570 new or expanded library buildings were built on the campuses of four-year and graduate institutions throughout this nation." All of this building generated, among other things, shelving for 163 million volumes. But print book acquisition was also at its apex during this period; in 1973-74, total shelving capacity increased by 25 million volumes, but 41 million volumes were acquired. Meanwhile, the Kent study was in its sixth and final year at the University of Pittsburgh, offering a glimpse into how few of those books might actually be used. OCLC had been in operation for only seven years; the MARC record was a youngster as well.The idea of resource-sharing on a mass scale may have existed, but in practice, a patron's best resource was the local print collection. Electronic resources were the dream of a few far-sighted individuals.

Library construction, 1975

It was in this context--a time when print books and library buildings were central to serving users -- that an unlikely event took place. On April 17-18, 1975, the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, a group of liberal arts colleges, convened a conference entitled "Touching Bottom in the Bottomless Pit" at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago. Organized by Daniel Gore, Library Director at Macalester College, the meeting drew 230 librarians to engage in "a national debate on space, growth, and performance problems in libraries." Speakers from Purdue, Berkeley, Earlham, Florida Atlantic, ISI, Universities of Georgia and Colorado, the Council on Library Resources and others tackled a difficult question: "Can library growth be curbed or halted without detriment to the central mission of libraries, namely the provision of books to readers?" A panel consisting of a state budget analyst, a Professor of English, the President of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, and the Executive Director of the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science discussed "Opportunities and Obstacles Along the Road to the No-Growth, High-Performance Library."

Perhaps it was a bolder time. It's difficult to imagine confronting these questions quite so directly today--even when resource sharing, digital content, and networked systems have made the discussion and concerted action much safer. Over the coming weeks, as I work my way through Farewell to Alexandria, I'll be looking for information and inspiration to influence our contemporary conversation on these issues. I expect to find it, and to report on it. Maybe it's time to do again that which has already been done.

PANtecedents

In last week's post about the PAN Forum at ALA Midwinter, I described what I understood to be the origins of the group. It turns out that there is more to the story. Prompted by a message from Jim Michalko in the OCLC Research, I looked a little further back. Good people have been plowing the fields of shared print for even longer than I had realized. So let's give credit where credit is due. A good place to start: the North American Storage Trust (NAST).

Take a look at this useful brief history of the NAST project. It is clear that ASERL (Association of Southeastern Research Libraries), in an initiative led by Paul Gherman (Vanderbilt), and Paul Willis (University of Kentucky) began grappling with these issues back in 1999. Significant data comparisons were done in 2003 and 2004, accompanied by early discussions of "shared virtual storage" and related strategies. ASERL, OCLC Research, and RLG all played major roles in this important work. Policy frameworks and data requirements for large-scale shared print were developed and reported in 2007. This groundwork continues to benefit all of us now working in this space.

Interestingly, meetings tied to ALA conferences were also occurring around this work, and in many ways these are the real antecedents to PAN. Among the invitees in a December 2006 email are some of the same people who continue to make major contributions to shared print efforts today:

• Constance Malpas (OCLC Research, author of Cloud-Sourcing Research Collections, Print Management at Mega-Scale, and other foundational works on shared print)
• Lizanne Payne (WEST, ReCAP, and other shared print projects)
• Bernie Reilly (Center for Research Libraries)

And others, including people from JSTOR, OCLC, Harvard, the Library of Congress, and the University of California system. These few, along with some of their colleagues, recognized early on the need to think collaboratively about our print collections. As a community, we owe them a vote of thanks.

The Pipes of PAN

The estimable Mr. Kieft

The Print Archive Network (PAN) Forum began in 2007 as an informal meeting of a few people interested in the fate of print collections in a digital age. Conceived by Bob Kieft, College Librarian at Occidental College and a long-time writer and speaker on shared print monographs, PAN meetings were initially supported by LYRASIS and subsequently by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL). Bob's idea has clearly struck a chord among academic libraries. The PAN meetings, customarily held on the Friday morning before each ALA and still chaired by the estimable Mr. Kieft, have grown steadily in attendance and agenda.

In Seattle two weeks ago, 70-80 people attended a 3-hour session that called to mind some new type of Big Heads meeting. There were even round-robin reports distributed in advance by ASERL, University of California's Shared Print program, University of Florida/FLARE, Maine Shared Collection Strategy, Connect New York, and others. A compilation of these reports and a selection of presentations are available at the PAN website, hosted by CRL. They are well worth some time for anyone interested in shared print activities. A few highlights follow.

This meeting's theme was 'Data & Tools for Print Archiving' and included presentations from:

• COPPUL (Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries), a group of 20 Canadian libraries working on shared print under a 'light governance agreement.' The group initially focused on 1,700 low-risk journal titles to build trust and develop techniques.

• GWLA (Greater Western Library Alliance), with 33 members (mostly ARLs) is looking to develop a batch approach to identifying, sharing, and carefully reducing some of its 90 million combined volumes.

• California State University (represented by Rick Lugg of SCS, CSU's vendor partner for collection analysis) reported on its 'Libraries of the Future' Task Force, a Chancellor's Office initiative looking at (among other things) system-wide management of print collections.  The first phase of data analysis, which involved 6 libraries and 3.7 million monograph records, was completed in October and is being reviewed.

• OCLC's Kathryn Harnish brought the group up to date on plans for a new version of WorldCat Collection Analysis, with a focus on 'machine access to pre-processed comparison data.'

• SCELC (Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium) has begun a shared print preservation project involving 57 libraries and 2.2 million book records.SCELC plans to host and manage the data on behalf of its members.

• ASERL (Association of Southeastern Research Libraries), working with the University of Florida, has developed two tools for managing tangible Government Document collections: a Disposition Database and a Gap Analysis tool. Both are open-source and available to other libraries.

• Lizanne Payne, on behalf of OCLC, CDL, and WEST, described progress on metadata guidelines for print archiving, and in particular the use of the MARC 583 Action Note. All libraries in print archiving programs are encouraged (at minimum) to use this field to communicate retention commitments.

• CRL (Center for Research Libraries) highlighted the need to review archived journal issues for completeness and condition, and demonstrated the high level of detail needed to resolve inconsistencies in holdings records and to perform issue-level validation. The CRLJSTOR Print Archive Tool was also demonstrated. Print archiving tools need to be developed for mobile platforms.

• CIC (Committee on Insitutional Cooperation) reported on its journals and Government Documents initiatives. They also plan to begin work on monographs, beginning with Ohio State, using the OCLC 'mega-regions' analysis as a framework.

We really are an acronym-happy lot, aren't we? Regardless, when next the pipes are calling, follow where they go ;-).

I Pity the Poor Immigrant

The Great Divide ca. 2012

Bless me, natives, for I have sinned. It has been 159 days since my last blog post. I confess that I have allowed the 'real world' to impinge. This marks me as a digital immigrant, one who views his online presence as something separate; a hapless, fragmented soul who has not managed to integrate his tangible and virtual selves.

I hear that digital natives experience no such cleavage in their psyches. Online activity is undifferentiated from life; posting is merely consciousness made visible. I envy that a bit. For a digital green-card-carrier, maintaining an online presence is more like speaking in a foreign language. It requires extra effort, and fluency can be elusive. Worse, as a digital immigrant of a certain age (is there another kind?), I am hardwired to give precedence to tangible realities and relationships. I cannot seem to listen and tweet simultaneously. I am a late Boomer.

Montreal: Le Trafic Horrible

In recent months, the real-world demands of building a new business have crowded out blogging & tweeting. A surprising number of librarians remain unaware of one's cyber-existence. Finding customers for a new service still requires showing up in person: to meet, to describe, to see, to listen, to articulate, to elaborate, to adjust, to convince--to make the case face-to-face. And showing up has meant grinding out actual miles since July: Anaheim, Amherst, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Waterloo, Pomona, Brockport, Northridge, Worcester, Buffalo, Montreal, DC, Sturbridge, Des Moines, Schenectady, Charleston, West Lafayette, Corvallis...and soon enough to Seattle, Columbia, Utrecht and beyond.

Land of the Needle Jets

This is just how it works in the physical world: needle jets, thruways, traffic jams, library after library, spreading the word: "Rethinking Library Resources" and "Data-Driven Deselection for Monographs" and "Shared Print Management." Road food, flight delays, and time zone changes, punctuated by conference calls at highway rest stops, proposal writing, development meetings, negotiations, data discussions and project planning. All of this involves its own pleasures and pains, but seems to exist in a parallel universe, lacking convenient links or for that matter much convenience at all.

Meanwhile, ironically enough, my partners and I at SCS are building a virtual operation to serve a tangible need: cloud-based analytics to help manage print book collections. Amazon Web Services, Google Apps, postgres databases, solr indexes, FTP, DropBox, WebEx, Skype, and Google Hangout, shared screens and a host of other invisible tools are wielded by actual, hard-working humans with a good idea. Like all immigrants, we live and work in two worlds.

Showing up in Sturbridge, MA

So now it's back to work here, in this sphere of blogs and twitterage. Once again we turn our efforts to mastering that second language. We may never speak it like natives, but we will make ourselves heard and understood!

• Sample & Hold: this blog will continue with comment on profession-wide issues related to deselection and shared print.
• SCSInsight: our company blog will highlight features, developments, ideas about service, and interesting case studies in conjunction with our library partners.
• @ricklugg will return to tweeting and re-tweeting on professional topics, with the occasional random comment.
• @SCSInsight will continue to tweet on projects, trends, benchmarking, and other findings drawn from active library projects.

In the end, we're just singing the immigrant song (minus the bit about 'we are your overlords', of course!). We live in the tangible world. We live in the virtual world. We have to work in both and at both, as we carry on trying to "solve one problem well."

Not Dark Yet

Recently, in the course of writing an article on 'Data-driven deselection' for Insights: the UKSG journal, I grew curious about the UK perspective on the future of print monographs. In particular, I wondered if the UK Research Reserve, described, in a quadruple-modifier extavaganza, as a "collaborative distributed national research collection" includes monographs as well as journals. For now, it does not. The UKRR remains focused on print journals, and an 'ambitious target of releasing 100km of shelf space by the end of 2013.'

But the group has indeed considered the question of books, most recently in a June 2011 report entitled Less is more: Managing monograph collections in the 21st century. The report is based on a 'Strategic Management of Monographs Forum' held in London on March 17, 2011. The purpose: "to determine whether there was interest in the library sector for a scheme aimed at de-duplicating monograph collections." More than fifty representatives from higher education, national library organizations, and the British Library considered the history of collaborative collection management efforts (e.g., the Atkinson Report [abstract], which in 1976 recommended 'self-renewing' libraries, with low-use material being discarded to make room for new material).

Forum participants working up 'punchy responses'

Attendees also weighed the potential for shared collections, as suggested in recent initiatives such as the White Rose Collaborative Collection Partnership among the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York and the British Library. (This project will be the subject of a more detailed post here soon.) But the main point of the day was to solicit views from many perspectives on deduplicating print monographs. A number of interesting comments surfaced as the group confronted four broad questions:

1. Is there a need for cooperative strategic management of monographs?
2. What are the risks and challenges to a collaborative model?
3. What are the barriers to success?
4. How might cooperative management be put into practice?

Primary source material, digitized

The document is well worth reading in its entirety, but the responses that particularly caught my eye included the following: (I have consolidated and paraphrased slightly, but have *not* tampered with their promised "punchiness.")

• The ecology of monographs is complex and fundamentally different than journals.
• Rationalisation of monographs would greatly affect the humanities research process.
• There is no strong demand for a large-scale national initiative. Better to build on existing regional initiatives, such as the White Rose collection management project.
• Libraries cannot afford, either fiscally or reputationally, merely to store collections. Active curation and disclosure are necessary.
• There is constant pressure on libraries across all sectors to reduce their estate footprint.
• In these difficult financial times libraries have a responsibility to only house collections which are of value to their institutions.
• There is a need to articulate a clear vision supported by all stakeholders. Any initiative should encompass the wider issues of strategic collection management and not be limited to deduplication activity. The drivers [to shared print management] need to be broader than financial.
• There is a risk of missing the window of opportunity for collaboration (as institutions begin to deduplicate independently instead.

At the end of the day, Less is more summarized the sense of the UK academic library community in this manner [emphasis added]:

"The steer from the delegates was though it would be useful to address these issues collaboratively it was not currently top of their institution's priorities [...] Indeed the group decided that now was not the time to commission a scoping study to look at this further."

As measured and rational as this conclusion may be, this 'wait and see' strategy strikes me as somewhat risky. Given what we as a community know about circulation rates (low), collection overlap (significant), and lifecycle management/opportunity costs (high), there is a strong argument for immediate action. Seen from a certain angle, libraries are expending scarce resources for very little return, and, at least in the US, this has not escaped the attention of administrators outside the library. That is not where we want the impetus for change to originate. We want the future of shared print collections to be shaped by library values. If we want enough time to assure that 'doing no harm' (to the collective collection) remains our top priority, it may be better to start now. As Dylan says, 'it's not dark yet, but it's getting there.'

[Photos from UKRR Website: 'Strategic Management of Monographs Discussion Forum' page]