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In less than a minute, I gleaned several unexpected thoughts (autographing books is changing), developments ("Joyce's unpublished work, particularly his letters, will [now] be available to scholars"), questions (there are people who use Windows phones?)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."

Deselection and 'Remedial' Discovery

Last Wednesday in Charleston, my colleagues Bob Kieft (Occidental College) and Sam Demas ('freelance librarian') and I facilitated a day-long preconference on 'Shared Print Archiving: Building the Collective Collection." We benefited from a full roster of speakers experienced in management of shared print collections: Lizanne Payne (CRL, WEST, and CIC); Emily Stambaugh (California Digital Library), John MacDonald (Claremont Colleges), Kathryn Harnish (OCLC), Michael Levine-Clark (Univ of Denver), Judith Russell (Univ of Florida, ASERL), Rachel Frick (CLIR/DLF), and Doug Way (Grand Valley State University).

The hordes gather to discuss shared print archiving

 Because we employed lightning talks and approached the topic broadly, discussions were more exploratory than definitive. As befits a discipline in the throes of formation, a certain element of confusion and chaos attended the day. But my overall sense is that a group of smart, experienced people worked hard to share information about disparate efforts, and to integrate them into a regional and even national conversation. More work, more focus, and still broader participation are needed, but we built on good work already underway.

One strand of conversation very much surprised me. The discussion around deselection and drawdown of duplicative print collections repeatedly turned toward discovery and digital content. This seems ironic in some respects, as shared print initiatives tend to focus first on titles that have never circulated. Why would we be concerned about the discoverability of content that has remained untouched for 10-20 years? On the surface, deselection and discovery seem like mutually exclusive categories. Is there really a need to enhance discovery of something that is being withdrawn or moved to storage for lack of use?

 Well, perhaps there is. As a group, we surfaced several arguments in favor of what I'll call 'remedial discovery.' 

• Self-fulfilling prophecy: One reason that titles don't circulate maybe because they are not found. Users are not always skilled searchers, and even the best cataloging records have a limited number of access points. Cataloging errors may also play a role here (e.g., a misspelling in a primary access field).

•  Shared print collections limit physical browsing: Paradoxically, the decision to rely on copies that are not held locally in open stacks increases the desire for some form of virtual browsing or enhanced discovery. A user may want to know more about a book before requesting it from another library or from a remote storage facility. The further away the books are, the more desirable virtual browsing appears.

• Record enhancements have not been universally applied: Many OPACs have taken a page from Amazon to include cover scans, flap copy, and tables of contents. But these enhancements have not been adopted for all libraries, and may not even be available for older titles--those most likely to surface as withdrawal or storage candidates. In some cases, older titles may not have had the same level of exposure as newer titles.

• Discovery layers are just coming into their own: Discovery tools have improved dramatically in the past few years. The more content that is indexed in those tools, the better the chances a user will find resources that may have been overlooked in the past. Here again, older materials have not benefited from these newer techniques. Perhaps they need another chance, with better tools.

Search: 'you are a faithless mad son of clocks and buzzers'

• Full-text indexing could stimulate use of older titles: Already the Google Books, Internet Archive, and Hathi Trust interfaces have radically improved the chances of finding older titles -- perhaps older titles that have previously been little used. 

It's an interesting take, and perhaps worth some experimentation. We've come at this topic from other angles previously, in posts on 'patron-driven re-acquisition' and 'curating a discovery environment.' All of this needs to be thought through more carefully, but maybe we ought to consider two simultaneous courses of action once unused titles have been identified.

1. Continue to draw down highly-redundant print collections in the context of shared print archiving and secure digital collections.
2. Enhance the remaining records for optimum discoverability. Give them a second chance to benefit from newer discovery tools.

The second of these is somewhat counter-intutitve, since it involves additional investment in a resource that has already cost far more than it has yielded. Some titles may not benefit from the additional work. But it may be worth testing on a small scale. Not only would it level the playing field for older titles, it would provide additional convenience to users examining content remotely. Specific enhancements might include:

• Add the Hathi Trust public domain URLs (where available) to catalog records for low-use titles
• Add Tables of Contents to catalog records for all eligible withdrawal candidates
• Add cover scans, flap copies, and links to reviews for these older, low-use titles
• Add eBook PDA records for withdrawal or storage candidates
• Devise a virtual browse function, similar to the Hathi page turner or Amazon 'Look Inside the Book'

No doubt there are other ideas. Some of them will require a good deal of work and investment. There are definitely some trade-offs here, and perhaps the approach must be selective to be affordable. But it's intriguing to think about creating better forms of discovery and access for material that is going offsite or will be held by another library. Lack of browsability is one of faculty's main objections to removing print from central campus stacks. Connecting deselection and enhanced discovery may be one way to answer that.

The 'Disapproval Plan' Revisited

In the December 2008 issue of Against the Grain, I introduced a new concept: "The Disapproval Plan: Rules-Based Weeding and Storage Decisions" [pdf]. The article's title was only somewhat tongue-in-cheek. As I tried to demonstrate, selection and deselection represent the same function, performed at different points in a book's lifecycle. At both points, titles are accepted or rejected. Approval plan profiles assure consistent and customizable treatment of newly published titles. Disapproval plan profiles assure consistent and customizable treatment of older titles that have not circulated much. The goal, for most libraries, is to create--and maintain-- an active collection, relevant to the current and future needs of its users.

Approval plans support content acquisition decisions; disapproval plans support storage, weeding, and shared print decisions. Both approval plans and disapproval plans safeguard collection integrity while providing an efficient, reliable alternative to title-by-title scrutiny. Both approval plans and disapproval plans have limitations; both are most appropriately deployed to handle mainstream titles. Subject experts, whether librarians or faculty, remain essential for specialized materials and judgment calls, but rules-based or profile-driven approaches can relieve them of the need to make many obvious and repetitious decisions.

With the benefit of 3 more years of thinking about collection use, deselection, and shared management of print monograph collections, it's become clear that my initial sketch of the disapproval plan concept can be drastically simplified and refined. The original concept focused on commercial alternatives to locally-owned print, such as Google Books, eBook aggregators, print-on-demand, and the used book market. In retrospect, this approach over-emphasized 're-obtainability' and understated the fundamental importance of archival commitments and operating in the context of the 'collective collection.'

Since then, the emergence of the Hathi Trust digital archive (now containing 5.1 million full-text book titles), and shared print archiving initiatives such as those developed by WEST, ASERL, ReCAP, CRL and the CIC have changed the picture, creating new safeguards and expanding deselection options. The work of Constance Malpas, Lizanne Payne, Paul Courant, OhioLINK/OCLC and others has provided new data and insight on print monographs overlap, storage capacity, and costs.

One key fact has not changed, though. The need remains for an automated tool that assembles relevant deselection metadata, and develops rules to operate against that metadata: a deselection decision-support tool. Now is the time to adapt the disapproval plan to new realities, and to incorporate both archival values and service values into the model. The November 2011 release looks like this:

A 'disapproval plan' is a set of library-defined rules that must accomplish four tasks:

Define the deselection universe. What pool of titles is eligible for deselection consideration? Data elements and distinctions might include:

• Low-use or no-use titles: These can be identified from circulation, direct borrowing, in-house uses (if captured), and ILL data.

• Titles owned more than x years: Titles should be given a chance to circulate. Most libraries won't consider withdrawing a title owned for less than 5-10 years. Publication date provides a rough approximation, but leaves older imprints that are recently purchased in the pool. Acquisition date or accession date are much more reliable.

• Titles widely held elsewhere (see below).

• Titles that will be kept regardless of use: Works by faculty authors, notable alumni, Nobel Prize winners or are cited in authoritative bibliographies may need to be exempted.

• Specific editions or translations: A conservative approach would suggest that matching be conducted with FRBR work families turned off. This retrieves only those holdings that reflect the edition in hand.

Assure that withdrawal candidates remain secure.  Once the eligible low-use universe has been defined, the archival security of this content must be gauged. An individual library operating within the academic community must help assure that nothing is lost. While it may not be necessary that a title be held locally, we must satisfy ourselves that it has been secured somewhere. Deselection metadata and rules in support of collection integrity might include:

• Presence of a print copy safely archived in a trusted repository
• Presence in Hathi Trust digital archive 
• Presence in Hathi Trust print archive [under development]
• Explicit retention commitment for 4-6 copies nationally [MARC 583]
• Number and distribution of other print holdings nationally, globally, or regionally (shared print archiving)

Assure that withdrawal candidates remain accessible.  Once archiving has been assured in both print and digital form, accessibility comes to the fore. In general, archival copies should not leave the facility where they are secured. Instead, 'service copies' are needed. Deselection profiles need to incorporate this factor, which identifies where usable copies of the content exist and in what form. Here the salient data points are:

• Presence of a service copy in a regional service center
• Availability of alternate editions; i.e., same content, different vehicle
• Availability of commercial eBook versions/PDA records
• Availability of a print on demand edition
• Re-purchasable on the used book market 

Enable data-driven decisions to store, withdraw, or retain/curate. As approval profiles generate books, notifications, or exclusions when the profile is applied, the disapproval plan can support storage, withdrawal or retention decisions, depending on local needs. Low-use titles that are scarcely held elsewhere might become candidates for preservation or digitization, enabling any library to contribute to the collective collection.

As with selection, deselection work can be done by the library without outside assistance. Reports generated from the ILS or open-source collection evaluation tools such as the GIST Gifts & Deselection Manager can be employed. But we suggest there is also room for a vendor-assisted model for deselection and disapproval plans, which is why we founded Sustainable Collection Services (SCS). SCS offers a full-service model for deselection, much like approval vendors do for selection. SCS advises on data extracts; normalizes and validates library-supplied bibliographic, circulation, item, and holdings data; and compares low-use titles to WorldCat, Hathi Trust, and other external sources. 

We now offer in a mediated form the ability to interact with preliminary results and model different combinations of factors: use, time in collection, consortial partner print holdings, existence of Hathi Trust digital version, number of WorldCat holdings. FRBR on, FRBR off. Our tools support full-library analysis or focus on specific subjects or locations. Early in 2012, SCS plans to release a Web version of our service that will enable unmediated interaction with deselection metadata. The disapproval plan may yet live and thrive!

A final note: 'disapproval' has negative connotations, but selectivity always implies a mix of acceptance and rejection. Approval profiles always drive as much rejection as acceptance. For English-language books, a large approval plan might supply 20,000 new titles out of 60,000 candidates. The remaining 40,000 new books have in effect been 'disapproved.'

Lack of use over time constitutes disapproval of (or at least indifference toward) that title by patrons. They have chosen other books (or more likely, other [electronic] resources) to use instead. Disapproval in the form of withdrawal or removal to storage by the library simply reflects the preferences of users, and the security and accessibility of the content elsewhere.

Can we 'neutralize' this term by basing disapproval strictly on data? Probably not. Too bad, because it's a very useful term. These are not bad books. Deselection does not connote disapproval of their content. They are simply not relevant or no longer relevant to a specific user community. Selectors face the same decision when first choosing which titles will enter the collection--and with far less data at their disposal. At deselection, there is a track record.

Making the Case for Weeding

Collection managers at work last week

Last week, our small world of print monographs management approached its own instance of 'harmonic convergence'. A number of unrelated events coincided to illuminate the changing role of print collections in the academic community. Heat, light, and even the threat of fire emanated from several angles, and the humble task of library weeding reached the edges of the mainstream media. Overall, despite their sometimes unexpected origins, these developments advanced a timely and necessary discussion. Consider the forces aligned on this topic:

• Hathi Trust Constitutional Convention:An excellent summary from Feral Librarian includes the good news that "HathiTrust will establish a distributed print monograph archiving program among HathiTrust member libraries." This supplements Hathi's pioneering archive, that now includes secure digital versions of "over half of the collective holdings of ARL libraries."  John Wilkin's opening remarks to the Convention [pdf] emphasized the power of large-scale collaboration toward "an increasingly comprehensive shared collection." The addition of a print archive will assure that no content is lost. Check the Twitter hashtag #htcc for more.

Cultural critics?

• 6 Reasons We're In Another Book-Burning Period in History: Meanwhile, incomprehensibly, Cracked.com, the web version of a Mad magazine imitator, served up a provocative post by S. Peter Davis. The piece is a strange mix of inflammatory and informed, and occasionally even humorous. It taps into the outrage that can be engendered by discarding and destroying books, no matter how strong the rationale. As of today, the article has been viewed 665,668 times--far beyond the audience reached by librarians wrestling with these issues. Davis sees that weeding may be necessary; he objects to the destruction of withdrawn volumes.

• 'Hard Choices: Do Libraries Really Destroy Books?" An NPR blog called Monkey See brought the "Cracked" entry to a still wider audience but with a more balanced perspective and some actual reporting. The author spoke with Betsy Simpson, President of Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS). Ms. Simpson articulated the academic library perspective fully and well, noting the library's "mission to preserve the cultural record' in the face of simultaneous need for [user] "space to interact and collaborate" and the existence of many unused copies of the same titles.

• ARL Membership meeting: The Chronicle's 'Wired Campus' blog reported that the agenda for the Association of Research Libraries' Directors annual meeting in Washington, DC included presentations on the Digital Public Library of America, an update on HathiTrust, and on the changing nature of research. In a session on 'Rebalancing the Investment in Collections', H. Thomas Hickerson, the Vice Provost and University Librarian at University of Calgary, noted that 'the comprehensive and well-crafted collection is no longer an end in itself.' Ed van Gemert, deputy director of libraries at UW-Madison, noted: "We simply can't afford to do work separately that could be done collectively."

Not weeding has consequences, too

All in all, not a bad week for the concepts of weeding and collaboration: a healthy mix of attention, controversy, innovation, misunderstanding, good sense, and passion. (More like dissonant convergence, I guess.) Perhaps these events are most usefully seen as a challenge to all of us engaged in deselection, shared print management, and digital archiving. The challenge is to continue to clarify our own thinking, refine our message, and get better at making our case not only to ourselves but to the wider community. Weeding is necessary. Weeding is responsible. Weeding can be made safe. Collection security will assured  collaboratively.

This is the main reason that we at Sustainable Collection Services have adopted an approach to monographs deselection that relies on data. Taken together, the number of copies held globally or within a specific region, circulation and in-house use over time, and the existence of a secure digital copy can create a safe and suitable list of withdrawal candidates. Disposition options are numerous, and each involves different trade-offs and costs. But, as Betsy Simpson and even Cracked.com indicated, the underlying problem is real. We need to explain why some books may need to be removed, and what is to be done with them. We need to make the case.

Here are my suggestions for talking points on the rationale for weeding. I'll add supporting data points in another post. First, let's see if this high-level message works. Thoughts?

• Electronic resources are the dominant information format
• Print use is low and declining
• Library stacks and storage facilities are crowded
• Library space is wanted for other purposes
• Keeping print books on the shelves is expensive
• Many copies of the same titles exist in many libraries
• Secure digital versions exist for millions of titles
• The infrastructure to support sharing exists and is growing
• Savings from adopting shared print can support other library services

Library Logistics

Recently, in my thinking about servicing shared print monograph collections, the concept of logistics has loomed large. In order to satisfy user expectations for delivery of books from regional repositories, these centers will have to operate as fast and efficiently as Amazon, UPS, or FedEx. In addition to assuring the persistence of the scholarly record, the core competencies of regional print repositories will become inventory control and speed of fulfillment. Digitization and print-on-demand will follow in time. In this deeply unromantic view of library services, shared print service centers will become a key link in the long-tail supply chain.

In a technical definition of logistics drawn from Wikipedia, service centers must achieve 'high due-date reliability, short delivery times, low inventory level and high capacity utilization.'  To my mind, this frames the management challenges around shared print collections very accurately. From Paul Courant and others, we are learning just how expensive it is to manage low-use print material. We need to lower those costs while assuring continued and convenient access. To do so, libraries need to embrace logistics.

Always ahead of the curve, Lorcan Dempsey introduced the phrase 'library logistics' in November 2004, and amplified its meaning in subsequent posts. To excerpt from a couple of his attempts at definition:

Logistics is about moving information, materials, and services through a network cost-effectively. Resource sharing is supported by a library logistics apparatus. [...] Increasingly, as libraries look at shared solutions for off-site storage, [...], digitization and archiving, they run into logistics and supply-chain management questions.

There are a number of interesting permutations to this idea, especially in relation to shared print monograph collections. Here are some steps I believe we need to take to begin to benefit from a very different approach to managing tangible collections.

Separate 'archive copies' from 'service copies.' This distinction is underdeveloped in discussions of shared print. I suspect this is largely because those efforts are at present focused on journals. With journals, a single copy can often support both archiving and distribution, because article scanning and document delivery are well-developed systems, and because articles are shorter than books. This allows a print volume to be cared for, but also for its contents to be disseminated. In August, the WEST group, which has wrestled with these issues thoroughly, codified its recommended practices in its "Access Guidelines for WEST Archives [pdf]. For delivery methods, it recommends, in order of preference:

1. Provide electronic document delivery (including color scans when appropriate)
2. Provide photocopies
3. Loan the physical issue or volume to the borrowing library for building use only.

This make excellent sense for journals. For now, though, this approach is not well suited to books. The length of texts and copyright issues make scanning, photocopying, and building-only use much less practical.

Monographs will require a different service model, at least for the foreseeable future. It will most often require the delivery of a copy to a user. This model introduces both risk (of loss or damage) and significant logistical challenges. The risk is easily mitigated: designate a shared copy or copies 'archival' and prohibit their use, except for subsequent non-destructive digitization. For books, one or more dark archive copies, supplemented (where possible) with a secure digitally-archived version in HathiTrust, would satisfy preservation and security needs. This step is foundational; no service layer can be built until the archiving imperative has been met.

The logistical challenges can then be met with an active, well-managed inventory of  'service copies.' Since most titles in offsite storage have seen little or no user demand, the number of service copies needed in a region may be quite small. This would depend on the size of the user base and the number of libraries relying on the regional facility.. This is where inventory management techniques developed in other contexts could begin to contribute to a radically different service environment.

Raise the bar for regional library service centers. Distribution and supply-chain management are highly evolved in other industries and sectors. Servicing of shared print collections could benefit enormously from the expertise of large-scale book distributors like Ingram, Follett, or Baker & Taylor. The library world in general could learn from logistics experts at UPS, Amazon, or other companies. Service from regional library centers should be built to include 24-hour delivery direct-to-user, email order confirmation and tracking capability, real-time display of availability, and perhaps even the option to purchase via partner relationships.

One important question is how many such centers are needed. Amazon services the entire country from a handful of warehouses. UPS positions its distribution centers near airports and highway interchanges to enable rapid delivery. In short, once we separate servicing shared monograph collections from archiving them, we can manage the service copy inventory according to best practices drawn from other industries. A very few such centers, optimized for 24-hour delivery and long-tail inventory management, might serve the whole continent. Over time, these would be obvious nodes for print-on-demand production as well.While service copy distribution centers would cost money to establish and run, much of that cost could be offset by space and time savings in participating libraries. Cost would also suggest that a very few, high-volume centers would make the most sense.

Some library systems operate along these lines already, using a combination of storage facilities and courier services. As a small-scale example, the Tri-Universities Group (TUG) in Ontario provides delivery 'by midafternoon the following weekday' to its three member libraries from a shared storage facility in Guelph. The OrbisCascade Alliance provides 48-hour delivery within its two-state membership of 36 libraries. University of Missouri System Libraries Depository (UMLD) processes up to 100 book requests per day, with requested items leaving the facility within 24 hours of placement. Many similar initiatives exist and are constantly being improved. But the benefits relating to greater scale, automation, and shared costs remain intriguing.

Provide 24-hour delivery directly to any authenticated user in the region. Users will be much more inclined to accept that large portions of the print collection are stored elsewhere if it does not affect their personal workflow. For service copies stored in shared print repositories, 24-hour direct to user delivery would mostly eliminate this concern. While the shipping cost may be higher than at present, this would make offsite storage more palatable, and potentially almost invisible. Delivery direct-to-user would eliminate circulation desk mediation, holds, and staging for pickup by the user. A higher volume of transactions would lower the per-transaction cost, so this again suggests consolidation of supply in fewer, larger regional centers. Delivery and return could be standardized, and bid to local couriers, UPS, DHL, or FedEx. 

Manage inventory like a book distributor. Booksellers are experts at determining which titles are moving and which are not. Although these are likely to be long-tail operations (many titles, very few copies of each), it remains true that faster-moving titles require more copies on hand, and slower-moving titles fewer copies. Because archiving is handled separately, there is much more latitude to manage service copies based on their activity level. Titles that do not circulate might become candidates for print-on-demand or digital delivery only. Or, they might simply be retained in the warehouse, where the $.86 per year estimated cost of ownership is amortized across all the libraries in the group. 

In the end, to adapt another phrase from Lorcan, broad adoption of library logistics could confer the benefits of the 'network effect' on low-use monographs, driving costs out of the system while improving service to users.