Fixin' to Weed

As a lifelong Northerner, there are certain words I don't get to use. Y'all, for instance, will never sound right coming out of my mouth. Southern friends have warned me that I could be fined or jailed for saying it. (Well, OK, not in so many words, but you can tell.) Another example is fixin', as in I'm fixin' to have me some catfish. Fixin' is a fine word, full of resolve and focus. I figure it's safe to use as long as I don't actually speak it aloud. It's about getting ready, getting mentally prepared, even looking forward to something. As in 'I'm fixin' to weed the business section.'

Well, September's right around the corner, and with the start of the new academic year, we expect some librarians are fixin' to do some weeding this year--at least once all of those instruction sessions are over. We at SCS would like to suggest that fixin' to weed actually is an important first step, and that it's pretty straightforward. In less than a single day, it's possible to gauge the potential of a deselection project, by taking these 5 steps:

Look at your circulation data:  Ask for a report that shows how many books have not circulated in the past 10 years. Screen out reference and special collections titles from consideration. Other bits of data can help, e.g., date of last circulation, date acquired, but are not essential at this stage. Most libraries find that 40%-50% of their collection has not circulated in a decade. This report defines your library's sweet spot, the potential yield of a deselection project.

Look at your space: How crowded are the stacks? How busy are the stacks? How crowded are study spaces? What might you do with an additional 10,000 square feet? A writing center? An expanded information commons? Some big flatscreen monitors or whiteboards for collaboration? A coffee shop?

Look at alternatives for maintaining low-use content: How many copies of the same books are also in the collections of peers or borrowing partners? Can the library join a shared print retention initiative? How many holdings are shown in WorldCat? In what other forms might the same content be available; i.e., how readily replaceable or re-accessible is it?  

Look at an SCS Sample Report: See how aggregated deselection metadata can expedite decision-making. Collection summary reports help identify the most fruitful areas, and enable experimentation with deselection criteria. Withdrawal candidate lists highlight titles that meet those criteria. A library an also assemble this circulation and deselection metadata on its own.

 Look at the cost of doing nothing: While the biggest costs associated with inaction are opportunity costs (what else the library could do with the space occupied by unused material), there are also direct costs. These have been calculated by Courant and Nielsen at $4.26 per volume per year for titles in open stacks, and $.86/volume/year in high-density storage. Maintaining the status quo may be a desirable option, but it is not free.
 
 If the results in your library at all resemble what we've seen to date, you'll quickly move from fixin' to weed to chafin' to weed. Straightforward consideration of these five points won't take long, and will give you clear insight into the potential benefits of deselection in your own library. In effect, the data will help you make the case for deselection to yourself and your colleagues, and will echo David Maister's comment in his excellent Strategy and the Fat Smoker: "The necessary outcome of strategic planning is not insight but resolve."

As Good As The Data

My partners and I at Sustainable Collection Services (SCS) coined the term 'data-driven deselection' as shorthand for our service offering and web application. We believe that solid data can help rationalize the necessary drawdown of print monograph collections, a process that sometimes elicits strong emotions. Good data  lays out the facts and sets context. Consideration of circulation rates, the number of other copies in the state, region, or nation, and the existence and accessibility of secure digital versions makes informed retention decisions possible. Data-driven deselection assures that withdrawals take place only when a title is well-secured in the collective collection. The very same data assures that the collective collection does not remain overloaded with copies of low-use books. It enables intelligent action.

Data, of course, is not monolithic. Despite the prevalence of library standards and agreed practices, there can be substantial differences among data from seemingly similar collections. For monographs deselection, the working data set includes not only bibliographic records, but item/holdings information (e.g. location, barcode number, enumeration), and circulation data. Even when bibliographic data is relatively consistent,  item records and circulation data often vary a great deal. A few observations from our early experience: 

There are no perfect catalogs. Not exactly a news flash, but all catalogs include a healthy number of mistakes. Some matter more than others, and some matter more to users than to the analytics SCS is performing. Our work allows us to ignore most problems related to descriptive cataloging, but SCS does rely heavily (though not exclusively) on control numbers. The OCLC number, LCCN, and ISBN comprise the holy trinity for matching a library's holdings against WorldCat, HathiTrust and other target data sets. Control numbers seem straightforward, and in fact are--assuming that:  

1) they are actually present;
2) they are formed correctly;
3) prefixes are entered consistently; and
4) mysterious errors such as the insertion of a '7' in front of some OCLC numbers have not occurred.

Suffice it to say that data normalization on these fields is an essential first step.

There are even fewer perfect inventories. Even the loveliest bibliographic record cannot directly answer the question 'is this item really on the shelf?' Shelf-reading and regular inventories are the sorts of tasks that libraries often defer in the press of other business. This is a logical trade-off in an era when print use is declining. But like all deferred maintenance, it eventually bites back.As shared print collections become more important, reliable inventory data is essential. That reliability is not a given at present; just ask any ILL librarian. Therefore, the date--and results-- of the library's most recent inventory should be articulated in any deselection project.

Errors and anomalies also scale. Efficiency, batch processing, and scale are essential to library operations. It is important to remember that the flip side of these approaches is the possibility of systemic error. In a large data set, even a miniscule rate of errors or gaps can result in a sizable raw number of exceptions. A set of 1 million records that is 95% accurate includes 50,000 errors or questions. Such a data set would be rated AAA--and probably doesn't exist.

Holdings in WorldCat and regional union catalogs are not always current. Spurred by journal de-accessioning projects, many libraries in recent years have embarked on OCLC "reclamation" projects, to assure that all holdings in the library's catalog are represented in WorldCat. This sort of recalibration is a good thing; the more libraries that pursue it, the more reliable the holdings information in WorldCat. Reclamation also benefits monographs, and improves the accuracy of the WorldCat data on the number of copies held in the collective collection.. The integrity of the shared print collection depends on verified holdings. The final step in any withdrawal project should be the removal of holdings from OCLC (or, as shared print archiving grows, the replacement of the library's holding symbol with that of the regional storage facility upon which it relies).

Circulation data varies widely and wildly. This point has come home to us with vigor recently, as we begin work with a small group of libraries seeking to share responsibility for retention of low-use print monographs. The first task is to identify those low-circulation titles, which requires combining and normalizing circulation data. This is more difficult than it sounds.  Three different library systems are in use among the group, which means that circulation data is captured in different ways. Some libraries have total circulations back to 1988; others only for a few years. Some libraries retain the date of last circulation (at least for some segment of the data); others do not. Some libraries include in-house use, ILL, and reserve transactions in their circulation counts; others do not. Some libraries use their circulation module to 'check out' books to Acquisitions or Cataloging or Bindery while they are in process; others do not. What common usage data exists across all participating libraries? What level of analysis will the data support? Stay tuned on that one; there's a good deal of work to do first.

These are just examples, of course. But they begin to illustrate the need for caution and precision in handling the data on which deselection decisions will be based. At present, when so many libraries have so much overlapping and unused content, it is possible to set aside any items with questionable data and still have plenty of scope to act. There are enough items with good data to achieve first-round deselection targets. For now, we can make significant progress by acting on only what the best data supports. Longer-term, this will get more complicated. As a community, we'll need to improve the data, or agree to run bigger risks.

Discarding Useless Materials

NYPL on opening day, May 23, 1911

In April 1911, just one month before the New York Public Library opened its grand new main library on the site of the old Croton reservoir, New York State's Inspector of Public Libraries Asa Wynkoop contributed two short articles to New York Libraries: "Gifts of Books" and "Discarding Useless Material." The full citation appears in a previous post, where I also describe my pursuit of these obscure writings. I was curious to know how weeding and deselection were described a century ago--when there was no electronic content, when books were much scarcer, and when the great print collections in the US were just beginning to be built.

A few added lines to the sketch. A hundred years ago, in 1911:

• 11,123 books were published, according to the American Library Annual. That's less than 10% of the current rate of publication.

• UC/Berkeley's new Doe Library opened with 160,000 volumes. (Berkeley's entire collection at the time consisted of 210,000 volumes.) Doe was built with decades of growth in mind, to hold 800,000 volumes. As of 2009, Berkeley reports holdings of 11 million book volumes.

• Human memory was a primary backup system. New York Libraries reported that "a fire destroyed the copy--nearly ready for the printer--of the Tentative selection from the best books of 1910, together with all the notes on which it was based and the books themselves." The list "will be reconstructed in large measure from the memories of those who have been actively engaged in the preliminary work..."

Berkeley's Doe Library under construction in 1909

As ever, though, space and other resources were in short supply. Most libraries had to confront these limitations, and some scrutiny of collections was in order. Mr. Wynkoop's hard-headed, practical advice, though aimed at smaller libraries, resonates surprisingly well today even at the research level. In effect, the abundance of print collected over the past hundred years has rendered even the largest libraries "small.".

The first article, on "Gifts of Books", sought to prevent the acquisition of unwanted material in the first place. Mr. Wynkoop recommends: "Never place on the shelves a book which [the library] would not select and buy if it had the money." He goes on to say "it should further be borne in mind that it costs a library far more in the course of years to keep and care for a book than to buy it. Every book on the shelves is a positive and continuous expense, and it is a simple waste of a library's resources to incur this expense unless the book is likely to yield an actual return."  As concise a case for caution in regard to "free" books as I've come across. Note also the century-old focus on ROI.

The second piece, "Discarding Useless Materials" addresses the management of books that have reached the shelves. In contemporary terms, it encompasses cost avoidance, lifecycle costs, discoverability, and collection sustainability. Overall, Inspector Wynkoop has some strong words for the profession (emphasis added):

"Librarians show a good deal of timidity and lack of a definite policy [in] the discarding from their shelves of obsolete and useless material."

"When a book once gets on the shelves, it seems to acquire in the eyes of most librarians a peculiar virtue and reverence, irrespective of any service it may render."

"In how many libraries where costly additions of new rooms or buildings have been necessitated to accommodate the growing collection, could this expense have been spared and the money utilized for positive enrichment of the collection, had the shelves been freed from the dead material with which they are encumbered!"

"Good live books are often lost or buried among dead ones. It has been shown by experiment again and again that a collection of best books, when grouped by themselves, receive twice as much use as when scattered among old and obsolete material."

In short, he speaks about weeding and deselection directly and vigorously. Mr. Wynkoop also has little patience for agonizing over deselection decisions, and here his argument takes an interesting turn.

"There is no intrinsic reason why [elimination of unused books] should be such a difficult or delicate task. It is certainly easier to know the value of a book which has been on the shelves for years than that of a book which has not yet been bought. Every time books are selected for purchase, other books are rejected, and rejection after purchase and after a test of years is certainly an easier matter than rejection before purchase where not tests of actual value have been possible."

Here is a perspective I had never considered, namely that deselection occurs throughout a book's lifecycle. No library buys every title published. Every library deselects extensively from the endless stream of new publications. Deselection at that point is a form of speculation. Deselection that occurs after ten years on the shelf without a single use is a clearer and more defensible decision.

The Inspector keeps a stern eye on costs throughout his argument, especially "the fallacious idea that the main expense of a book is its original cost." In recognition of the "reverence" of  library boards for "mere size and numbers", he suggests "establishment of a storage department, away from the public shelves, to which all obsolete and useless matter can be transferred." It's a bracing and eerily relevant read from beginning to end.

In his closing, he contends that a good library "is not a mere accumulation of books but a selection, and this selection should represent not a mere succession of past acts but a continuous and active process." In my own closing, let me just doff my hat to the good Inspector and humbly quote Hunter S. Thompson, among others: "Res ipsa loquitor." Good sense stands the test of time.
  -----------------------------------------------------
Photo Credits:

NYPL: - Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Bain Collection - Reproduction number: LC-DIG-ggbain-09235

Doe Library: UC/Berkeley Library History Room, http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/give/historyroom/panel3.html

Old School

The Apex of Civilization (1987)

It's shockingly easy to forget how far library services have advanced in the past 25 years. Even those of us who thought a self-correcting electric typewriter was the apex of civilization now expect -- and take for granted -- remote desktop access to most content. Last week I was reminded of just how much overhead can still be involved in information seeking. It made me want to assail the nearest campus with a bullhorn, shouting "You don't know how good you have it!" I always loved it when my parents said stuff like that to me.

Several months ago, I came across an interesting citation in ALA Fact Sheet 15: Weeding Library Collections, alerted to it by Karen Muller's Ask the ALA Librarian blog:  

Wynkoop, Asa. "Discarding Useless Material." Wisconsin Library Bulletin. 7, no. 1 (1911): 53.

I appreciated the literal deployment of the word "useless" to describe materials that had not circulated. I grew curious about how library weeding was discussed a hundred years ago, and thought a centennial snapshot might prove interesting. Since I am a modern man, I began my search in Google. An excellent summary from the Wisconsin Library Heritage Center appeared as the first result. Good start. It noted that that most of the Bulletin had been digitized as part of Google Books. Very promising. 1905, 1907, 1908, 1910 are available. 1917... yes! 1911...no.  As a UK football fan might say, "unlucky!"

Plan B. As a network-level denizen, I next opted to search WorldCat. I immediately found the record for Wisconsin Library Bulletin, and keyed in my zip code. As I had feared, the nearest copy lay 71 miles away, in the Beatley Library at Simmons College, past destination of my library-school papers, as bashed out on the aforementioned IBM Selectric. Like many a librarian who works outside of an academic institution, however, I have limited access to research databases, and virtually none to ILL or document delivery for such specialized titles. And at that pesky sub-network level, where objects actually have to be transported from one place to another, well, I live in New Hampshire and the bound volume is in Boston. (See Karen Coyle's recent blog post "Unequal Access.") Bottom line...road trip! 

I-93 South

On the up side, I know the trail well. I cleared my calendar for the next day, filled up the Matrix, and headed south. It was a Thursday, late enough to miss full rush hour, but...still a whisker shy of the Platonic form of a good day.. Luckily I had Old 97's newest, Grand Theater, Volume 2, to keep me happy. That is one cheerful-sounding band. Rather than shatter all that good humor, let's just say that the drive allowed me to hear all 13 songs twice. Parking around Simmons can be tough, too, but I lucked out with a garage that only charged $13 for the first hour. Positively vibrating with...something, I

Target Database

walked a few blocks to the Library, and began to  troll the compact shelving. Found the WLB run from 1911, after a heart-stopping moment when a stack of microfilm boxes entered my field of vision. (Please, not that.) Suddenly, there it stood, exactly where it was supposed to be. Success! The old-school high. It really is a thrill to find something after so much trouble.

In skimming the WLB version of the article, I noticed it had in fact been reprinted from the April 1911 issue of New York Libraries. As now, the topic of weeding was sweeping the land. Might as well have the original, I reckoned--and Simmons' ancient bound periodical collection came up aces again. The text of the two versions proved identical, but the NYL version did yield one new nugget: Asa Wynkoop, the article's author, held the august position of New York's "Inspector of Public Libraries." What an excellent title. What a fine idea. Where are they now--those Inspectors of Public Libraries? We'll actually get to that question and to "Discarding Useless Material" in next week's post. But first, let's finish the old-school retrieval process.

No copy and paste here, no instant printing. Shades of 25 years ago at Simmons, I spent some quality time with the photocopier. Instead of searching for coins, one now obtains a visitor card, goes online and adds value to that card. So there's that improvement, which takes only a few minutes longer than finding change for a 5-dollar bill. One copier appears to be working but is occupied. One is out of paper. One bears an abstruse message about "key reset" and does not respond to any command. When the single functioning unit is free, it turns out to work no better than I recall from my student days, as these scans will attest. I have new respect for the scanners at Google, the Internet Archive and everywhere. But at last, I had the information in my hands. Now all I had to do was get home with my treasure.

Not so very long ago, some version of this experience was the norm.Clearly it can still occur. If only Mr. Wynkoop had had the courtesy to publish his piece in 1910 (already scanned and available through Google Books and Hathi Trust), I could have learned in 5 minutes what ate up most of a day. On some level, that's what we all expect; it's startling to be reminded how completely things have changed. The productivity improvements unleashed by digital access to content can hardly be overstated. But it can also be easy to forget that mass digitization is still a work in progress, that gaps remain in the electronic version of our professional record. And equally startling that some of those gaps can still be filled by print. With some effort. 

Old-school information retrieval was (and is) time-intensive, labor-intensive, expense-intensive. Often it's impossible to know beforehand whether the item you're seeking is worth the investment. A citation is just a starting point. You have to be pretty damn motivated (obsessed? foolish?) to drive 150 miles, spend $40 on gas, tolls, and parking, and burn a full day to retrieve an article that turns out to consist of three long paragraphs. Most contemporary students would not consider this rational behavior. I'm not even sure I do.

But I am glad to have the article. I'm glad to know that old-school still works when needed. I'm also glad that for the most part I can search, click, and view without this insane degree of overhead. I look forward to the day when the entire run of the Wisconsin Library Bulletin is available digitally. But in the meantime, I'm also glad that Simmons had these 100-year old print volumes, and that their use will now be counted. As of last Thursday, they are decidedly not useless materials.

Use Study in Progress

Let Nothing Be Lost

Photo by Philippe Artero

We all have our passions. Good songwriting is one of mine. My pantheon includes grizzled veterans like Dylan and Steve Earle, relative newcomers like Conor Oberst, minor rocking word-mongers like Ian Hunter, Paul Westerberg, and Graham Parker, and choice imports like Paul Kelly. It's a long list of semi-obscure names, from Todd Snider and Peter Case to Butch Hancock and Bill Morrissey.

Bill Morrissey died a traveling musician's death this past weekend, alone in a hotel room in Georgia, on his way back to New Hampshire from a series of gigs in the South. Whether his failing health or the hellhound on his trail caught up to him really doesn't matter. He's gone, and the world is down one quirky voice, one wicked sense of humor, one consummate lyrical craftsman -- and, oddly enough for folk music--one subtle arranger of horns.

Bill's work remains, though: 12 recordings, a novel published in 1997 by Knopf, and his now-spectral presence on YouTube. Morrissey somehow grafted the jaunty blues of Mississippi John Hurt onto a small-town northern New England world. You could say he originated a modest new genre: the north-country blues. Try "Night Shift." But his songs also showed wit and verve, like "Big Leg Ida." He was a small-scale musician with a unique sound and sensibility, the sort of artist who is an acquired taste, and whose works might easily disappear.

As with most small-scale artists, there are inconsistencies in his catalog, and it is easy to miss important distinctions. His first album "Bill Morrissey" was released on LP in 1984 by Reckless Records, a small label based in Cambridge, MA. Its 12 tracks exude that first-album mix of energy and pent-up ambition. Reckless 1917 (its catalog #) never made the transition to CD. Instead, in 1991, Morrissey re-recorded the same songs (plus a few others) directly to DAT (remember that format?) for a new label. These new versions became the CD version, which was released as Philo 1105.

Both recordings are called "Bill Morrissey." Both contain the same songs in the same order. But Reckless 1917 and Philo1105 are very different works. Seven years and two other albums separate them. The singer's take on the songs has softened, phrasings have become more subtle. There's more experience, but less bite. The guitar is lower in the mix. All these years later, it is fascinating to compare the two, and to witness the changes that time and continuing work have wrought on the artist. This is only possible because both versions still exist.

But that shared existence is tenuous. I suppose that's why I dwell on Bill's legacy in the context of deselection. This is content I care about and know a lot about. I believe it matters that his full range of work be preserved and remain accessible to anyone who may be interested. I happen to own that original LP, because I bought it back in 1984. It has languished on my unweeded and largely untouched shelves of vinyl for many years. But yesterday I needed it, because the 1991 version of "Barstow" on my MP3 player didn't seem quite right. I needed something more like the first time I heard it from the tiny stage at The Stone Church, before it was ever recorded. I needed something very specific.

This is an experience common to any expert in any field. This is why we have to be so careful about the scholarly and cultural record. Minute variations can matter. In comparing these two versions of "Bill Morrissey" without sufficient care, it would be easy to conclude, erroneously, that they were the same--and to discard one of them. As we begin to draw down our redundant library collections, we need to be exacting in our determination of what is redundant and what is unique. We need to be certain that we're not discarding some irreplaceable piece of the record, even if it's only of interest to a handful of experts or zealots. While ultimately we may not need many copies of anything, it is essential that we keep at least one copy of everything--even if that work has not been used for decades.

In my world, it's bad enough that Bill Morrissey the man has gone to join Django and Robert Johnson. I'm glad not to have compounded the loss by tossing an LP I hadn't touched for years. Bill's record is complete, if only in my basement. As librarians, we need to recognize that this fear of irretrievable loss exists for every corner of our collections. The risk of loss is real. We need to recognize this and take commensurate care as we manage our collections down. We all have our passions.

The Sweet Spot

"A sweet spot is a place, often numerical as opposed to physical, where a combination of factors results in a maximum response for a given amount of effort." --Wikipedia

The term is most often used in relation to baseball, tennis, or (one hears but does not comprehend) cricket. But virtually every activity, including the humble task of responsible deselection, boasts an area of maximum effect for effort applied. In other words, it is easy to identify a substantial number of withdrawal candidates with a handful of conservative criteria. These data points are not only straightforward to decide upon and generate, they also demonstrate that even a highly conservative approach can yield appreciable results.

Consider these recent projects run by Sustainable Collection Services. In each case, the library chose a set of attributes to apply against its circulating monograph collections. All of these criteria were later refined or adapted by subject or location, or in response to the initial results. But the initial results themselves are quite instructive. (Please note that these are US libraries; the chosen factors reflect that perspective.)
=======================================

Library A chose these attributes for its first-pass deselection candidates:

• No circulations since1998
• Publication date: 1999 or earlier
• More than 100 holdings in US libraries (WorldCat data)
• Not listed in Resources for College Libaries
• Not reviewed in CHOICE

 
Library A Result: 17% of circulating monographs, yielding approximately 47,000 withdrawal candidates.

========================================
 
Library B chose a slightly different set of attributes:

• No circulations
• Publication date: 1999 or earlier
• Last use: 1999 or earlier
• More than 100 holdings in US libraries (WorldCat data)
• At least one other holding in consortium
• Not listed in Resources for College Libraries
• Not reviewed in CHOICE

Library B Result: 31% of circulating monographs, yielding more than 60,000 candidates.

========================================

Library C chose an even simpler variation:

• No circulations
• Publication Date: 1999 or earlier
• More than 100 holdings in US libraries (WorldCat data)
• 2 or more other copies in consortium

Library C Result: 10% of circulating monographs, yielding more than 70,000 candidates. 

========================================

Although the same criteria are not universally applied, they are similar and consistently conservative. Candidates are indisputably little-used. They are indisputably widely available, and definitely available locally. There is no reliance or even reference to digital versions of this content. This combination of factors involves virtually no risk, but nonetheless creates a "maximum response." Although the percentage of the total collection varies from 10% to 31%, tens of thousands of books are identified as candidates in each case. The result: a zone of immediate action. A sweet spot.

Some caveats apply. (After all, baseball bats can also break only inches from the sweet spot.) For one thing, all disciplines are not equal, either in book use or in the importance of monographs to their users. Deselection criteria in Art will need to vary from those in Chemistry. On the other hand, project managers may want to know what happens if titles that have circulated once since 2000 are included, or how many more titles may be eligible if the number of US holdings is set at 50 rather than 100. The ability to interact with the data to model different scenarios can help refine the withdrawal/storage criteria.

It is also critical to understand the context before acting on data, even if it is this compelling. It is important to understand the commitment of consortial partners and other libraries to these same titles. It is equally important to share that responsibility by retaining some of them. On a regional level, last-copy commitments are being worked out now in many places. On a national level, the movement to use the MARC 583 Preservation Action Note to disclose such commitments is growing. The eventual inclusion of separate holdings symbols for shared print storage facilities will make the context clearer still.

WTF?

But we shouldn't wait too long. Some action is possible now. Look again at the criteria outlined above. We're talking about books that have remained untouched for more than ten years. All of them were published more than 12 years ago. With more than 100 copies (often many more) in the US. With at least 1-2 other copies in the region. Tens of thousands of books that fit this very conservative description, in library after library. Yes, we need to be careful. We need to base decisions on data. But if this isn't a sweet spot, then... I'm an expert on cricket.

Solving One Problem

"You see this? [Holding up a bullet]. This is this. This ain't something else. This is this." -- Michael (The Deer Hunter)

Anyone who is paying even cursory attention to academic libraries knows the story. We have entered an era of consolidation: aggregation of content, metadata and user demand, with library services migrating to the network level. End-to-end solutions are the order of the day. Webscale management systems promise to take library data and transactions to the cloud. Vendors of every stripe are vying to build the one discovery or management system that answers all needs. Systemic change is underway, and there is real value to be created and reaped as this transition progresses. As a new vendor, Sustainable Collection Services plans to create and consume some of that value ourselves. 

But at times the scale and complexity of it all threaten to overload the circuits. It's hard to wrap one's mind around all the permutations. Every task or interaction seems to depend on some other task or operation. Simple conversations devolve into acronym-ridden gibberish. What's most frightening is that sometimes we actually seem to understand one another! In twelve years as a workflow and organizational design consultant, I've become accustomed to swimming in complexities and dependencies, striving to master the intricacies of process and technology and to align them with changing organizational priorities and fiscal realities. Confusion and conflict are constant companions, even when the results are good.

http://sustainablecollections.com

Well, where's the fun in that? It can be ridiculously hard. In response to both of these realities, my partners and I at Sustainable Collection Services have set a more modest goal: to solve a single problem to the best of our ability. One problem: This is this. This ain't something else. This is this! This is ours.

There are plenty of problems ripe for the picking. We choose this one: managing down print monograph collections. Many libraries suffer from stacks crowded with books that are little-used. Many copies of these same books are held elsewhere in the region or country. Space is needed for other purposes. Keeping unused print books on the shelf costs money. Many libraries could benefit significantly from reducing their onsite print collections. But this needs to be done carefully and responsibly, to assure that no content is lost to users. This is a situation we understand. This is a problem we can deal with well.

Deselection decisions involve many factors that are best considered simultaneously. How often has this book been used? Are there other copies in my region? How many copies are in the US collective collection? Have other libraries made a retention commitment for this title? Does it appear in Hathi Trust, and if so, is it public domain or in-copyright? Does it appear on authoritative title lists? Are commercial eBook versions available? Does it need to be added to my regional print archive? Was it written by a faculty member? 

Informed deselection decisions require assimilation and presentation of this diverse deselection metadata for each title. Efficient decision-making requires the ability to build rules based on this metadata, i.e., to move away from title-by-title scrutiny. Rational decision-making requires customization of deselection rules by discipline or location. Prudent decision-making requires the ability to iterate and refine rules and to view provisional results. Locally-aware decision-making requires the ability identify both withdrawal candidates and preservation candidates that suit a library's mission, priorities, and acceptance level.

We founded SCS solely to create and deploy a decision-support tool with these characteristics. For our first few customers, SCS has produced Collection Summary reports and Withdrawal Candidate Lists, often in several iterations. By doing this, we are learning which criteria and which data are useful to most libraries. We are eager to work with more libraries on this basis. But we have also begun to design a web-based application that enables libraries to interact with their own deselection metadata, and to predict the impact of various scenarios. On behalf of my partners Ruth Fischer, Andy Breeding, and Eric Redman, I invite you to take a closer look at our reports and services.

Wordle Tag Cloud of SCS Content

It is immensely satisfying to delve so deeply into this one issue, and to focus on solutions to a single problem. But it is also very effective. We are working daily to become experts in responsible monographs deselection. We can read everything on the topic. We can write about it in detail. We can confer with individual libraries. We can experiment. We can adapt. Best of all, the single-threaded approach gives SCS great clarity in our priorities and imposes a healthy discipline on our activities. We are not seeking to solve all the problems a library may face. We are not even seeking to solve all the problems related to deselection; journals and Government Documents are not on our agenda. SCS is all about monographs. This is this.