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]

Talking with Faculty about Library Collections

Earlier this month, I made my way to Maryville, MO, home of Northwest Missouri State University. It's a lovely drive north from the Kansas City Airport, more and more rural over the course of 70 miles. (Some of you may know it from the 'Brick & Click' Library Symposium held there each fall.)  Even locals describe Maryville as "in the middle of nowhere," but Northwest's B.D. Owens Library might be better described as "in the middle of the action."
 

iPlace: blurring the line between library & classroom

Over the past two years, Dr. Leslie Galbreath, Director of Academic and Library Services, has spearheaded a transformation of the Library's services, spaces, and collections. At peak times, the Owens Library now resembles a busy classroom, with groups of students huddled together around tables and laptops, covering the many whiteboards with outlines, graphs, and diagrams. The Library also houses several academic support departments, including a Talent Development Center, a Writing Center, a Proctoring Center, a Computer Lab, a Center for Information Technology & Education, and a collaborative workspace known as the iPlace. Northwest is seeking and apparently achieving a very close relationship between the Library and the University's teaching & learning services.

"Where Learners and Resources Meet"

Some of the space needed for these services was reclaimed from little-used print journal and reference collections, which have been removed and sold or recycled. Stacks on the first floor were reduced in size and number. Freed space was redesigned based on close observation of user behavior and many conversations with students. New designs include reconfigurable furniture, collaborative study space, casual spaces, individual study rooms and a quiet floor, a popular reading collection, and productive relationships with the academic support centers. Students are expressing their approval with their feet, driving  a 58% increase in gate count over the past two years.

The Owens Library: a happening place

This success raises new questions about how collections--especially print book collections--should be managed in future. At times, there is still more demand for seats than can be met. Meanwhile, as in most libraries, Owens circulation transactions are low and declining. Users largely prefer electronic resources. Like most universities, Northwest will continue to face budget constraints for the foreseeable future. More clear thinking and hard decisions are needed: about the balance between collections and curriculum, collections and budget, collections and user preferences, collections and space. To address these issues, the Library has begun to develop its first formal collection management plan.

Because some weeding has already taken place, Northwest has bought itself enough time to build its plan carefully. The Library's 200,000 or so books occupy shelves on two floors; most are at or below the 75% capacity recommended for efficient operation. The stacks are in excellent shape, with some room for growth, but also with potential for consolidation. Because space pressure is not the main driver at the moment, there is time for a campus-wide conversation about the future of collections. Even more importantly, that conversation can begin by focusing on user needs and budget realities rather than stack space. The Library also has time to engage its stakeholders. In fact, that was why I was invited to Maryville: to kick off a discussion with teaching faculty and librarians about the future of collections.

Here's an impressive fact about Northwest Missouri State's faculty: nearly 30 of them showed up on what was technically a day off to spend several hours thinking about library collections. The morning consisted of  two presentations, each followed by a fairly active discussion. My partners and I at Sustainable Collection Services (SCS) created these sessions in the course of developing our own business, and evolving our thinking about what we call "actionable collection intelligence."  The first, called "Rethinking Library Resources", outlines why we need to reconsider current practice: space pressure, low circulation, digital archiving, high levels of print redundancy, and the viability of shared print collections. The second, on "Data-Driven Deselection", describes how print collections might be drawn down safely and cost-effectively, working with a library's or consortium's circulation and holdings data.

For the most part, faculty have not previously heard these issues framed in this manner.This was the third time I've had an opportunity to speak directly to faculty. Reactions to the message vary, but the conversation is always interesting.

Rick Lugg of SCS talks about the future of print collections with NW Missouri faculty & librarians

At Northwest, several specific concerns surfaced as I suggested that print collections could continue to be drawn down with negligible impact on users. I've generalized these somewhat, to incorporate comments from discussions with faculty in other institutions:

• Collection use is a flawed metric. This objection has surfaced in every discussion I've had with faculty. The fact that a book circulates does not necessarily make it more valuable than a book that does not circulate, only more popular. Circulation alone should not determine whether an item stays or goes.

• In-Library use is under-counted. This is another common (and valid) comment. Users consult many books while working in the library, but most are not checked out. For libraries that do re-shelving counts, this use can be captured. Estimates of in-house use vary widely, with some libraries reporting 10 in-house uses for every circulation; a more common estimate is 2-3. We have no disagreement here. Re-shelving counts should be incorporated into use data whenever they are available.

• Qualitative measures are more important than quantitative measures. All uses are not equal. Sometimes a work is "essential" to an argument or piece of research. These should be weighted more heavily. Some books are better than others. The library should keep the best books on a topic, not the ones that happen to be used the most. Conversely, some books are poorly researched or written, and should be removed on that basis, regardless of use.

• A library must have books. Someone referred to this as 'books for looks'. Students need to know what it feels like to be surrounded by books, and to witness the extent and value of the scholarly record. A library collection represents that value tangibly.

• Accrediting bodies and curriculum committees require books. While this literal interpretation of library resources is no longer true in most disciplines, the perception remains that these bodies care about how much is published -- and collected -- in their disciplines.

• eBook versions are not always adequate. They work well in some disciplines but not in others. A History professor noted how difficult it is to take notes from/in eBooks. On the other hand, the ability to mount chapters for use in online classes is important.

• Books have artifactual value. Some books have value over and above their content. A sequence of editions, the use of a title over time, and the object itself may warrant retention.

• Shared print involves delays. Northwest is fortunate to be part of MOBIUS, a statewide resource-sharing network with a well-developed delivery infrastructure. But even a relatively short 48-hour wait for delivery can disrupt research, where a local copy on the shelf would allow it continue uninterrupted. ILL can take even longer. While a library can't hold everything on its shelves, more is better.

All of these points warrant consideration. As I've noted in a previous post, data-driven deselection can only be as good as the data. We should do our best to create the fullest picture of collection use. We should attempt to develop and implement qualitative measures, drawing from core lists, award, key authors, and faculty recommendations. But this has to be balanced with the fact that title-by-title consideration is simply not possible. We need techniques that rely on data, rules, and patterns. Faculty input can make collection management better, and their comments should give us pause, and cause us to adapt. But they should not stop us entirely.

NW Missouri State faculty & librarians prepare to visit the stacks

A Spa for Books

To paraphrase Jon Landau from 1973, I have seen library collections' future, and its name is ReCAP. Last week, my partner Ruth Fischer and I had occasion to visit the Research Collections and Preservation Consortium, a high-density offsite storage facility owned jointly by Princeton, Columbia, and New York Public Library. It's always a pleasure to see a well-run operation, and Executive Director Eileen Henthorne and her crew have really honed this one since it opened in 2002. 

10 million books in there!

Facts and figures

• Current capacity: 10 million volumes (96% full)
• 2 new modules under construction will hold another 8-10 million volumes
• On an average day, ReCAP takes in 3,000 items/day from its libraries; at peak load-in, this reached 8,000/day.
• 600-700 items per day are retrieved to fill patron requests; 24-48 hour fulfillment
• Annual retrieval rate is under 2%, indicating that the right items have moved offsite
• ReCAP has never lost an item!
• Climate is controlled at levels supporting 300-year preservation: 50-59 degrees; 35% relative humidity. In the colorful phrase of Jim Neal, Vice Provost at Columbia, ReCAP is "a spa for books." The facility is powered by solar panels on its roof.
• The facility is as clean, organized, and efficient as the library of our dreams
• While it is not directly browsable, it is immensely reliable and useful. This approach, however poorly it fits our romantic view of libraries, is exactly what we need to manage low-use tangible collections.

A Brief Tour in Pictures

ReCAP processing room

Incoming volumes are sorted by size

and placed in one of 16 sizes of acid-free cardboard trays

Barcodes on book, tray, and shelf manage the inventory--there is no bib data in the ReCAP system

After sizing, volumes are accessioned by scanning barcodes on piece and tray--system assigns a row/shelf

The entire accessioning process is repeated by a different worker to assure accuracy

Trays are then placed in the storage modules 

Every volume has a home address of several barcodes

Bowling alley wax is used on shelves to assure smooth movement of trays

Executive Director Eileen Henthorne & her staff know where *everything* is

Tools of the trade: barcode readers re-charging

Cart with forklift slots in base 

Needed because shelves are 30' high

Narrow-aisle picker vehicle with carts, trays, and visitor aboard

Books enroute from ReCAP to users: 24 hours from request to delivery

New modules under construction

Measuring Collection Use

Despite Neil Young's warning that 'numbers add up to nothing', sometimes they have to suffice. In the data gathering that underpins our deselection and shared print projects, we at SCS spend a lot of time looking closely at circulation statistics. Several factors influence what can be gleaned here:

•  ILS: Different library systems capture and store circulation data in different ways.

• Duration: Most libraries retain circulation data back as far as their last system migration, though a small percentage port historical checkouts over as part of the data transfer process.

• Definitions: Often a checkout is just a checkout. This usually includes direct borrowing and ILL transactions, but not always. Some libraries also use checkouts to monitor workflows, charging books out to Acquisitions, Cataloging, Bindery, etc.

• Transaction dates: Some systems capture only circulation totals. In others, it is possible to learn the date of the most recent circulation transaction.

Not to put too fine a point on it, there are no standards for circulation data. While this imposes some limits on the analysis that can be done for an individual library, it can be even more problematic in shared print projects, where it is necessary to derive a common basis for circulation activity. Even with its limitations, though, circulation data provides an important objective measure of collection use.

No one would argue that circulation activity constitutes the full picture, of course. As Walt Crawford and Michael Gorman point out in Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness and Reality: "To be effective politically, it is vital to record the totality of collection use." [WorldCat record]. This is easily confirmed in conversation with faculty and other library users, who often assert with some vigor that circulation represents only a partial picture of use. They base this, reasonably enough, on their own habits, and there is some quantitative support for this in cases where statistics for in-house use are available.

In one library we worked with recently, a 2-month sample of reshelving counts indicated that ten in-house uses occurred for every circulation. That is the highest number we have encountered. A more commonly-reported level is echoed in Future Libraries: "When libraries have counted in-library use, usually omitting pure browsing, the numbers are 2-3 times as high as actual circulations."

Especially when deselection is being considered, recognition of any and all use is important. The last thing we want to do is remove something from the shelves that is actually used. How can we be certain we're getting the fullest picture? 

The obvious answer is to institute or re-institute reshelving counts. This is a frustrating conclusion. It seems completely counter-intuitive and backward-looking to add this sort of work to a library's daily operations in the digital era. Reshelving counts are time-consuming, and require cooperation from users. They shift the focus to print when all signs point toward declining use and value.

But we need the data. We are beginning to make long-term decisions about the future of print collections, and we need those decisions to be as informed as possible. This means we need to capture in-house use--at least in some form.

The simplest and most accurate approach is to provide and promote regular reshelving counts--to identify and count all books used in the library. Stacks workers can scan the barcode and either tally in-house use separately or count it as a checkout. This approach ties use statistics to specific titles, which is optimal.

Some libraries will find this investment hard to justify or sustain. In those cases, a sampling approach could be adopted. Adopt reshelving counts for one week per quarter or one week per semester. This less labor-intensive approach could provide sufficient data for extrapolation; i.e., to calculate an estimated rate of in-house use that could augment actual circulation statistics.