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Summary of Advisory Board Conference Call, September 8, 2011

Maine Shared Collections Strategy
Advisory Board Conference Call, September 8, 2011
1-2:10 pm Eastern

In attendance:
Valerie Glenn, Clem Guthro, James Jackson-Sanborn, Bob Kieft, Barbara McDade, Constance Malpas, Lizanne Payne, Deb Rollins

Meeting Summary

Collection Analysis System:
Valerie asked the Advisory Board if they’d had a chance to review the list of questions/reports that we would like from a collection analysis system, and if they had any suggestions for additional items/things we were missing. It was agreed that we seemed to have everything covered; Bob suggested that date of accession might be good to include in addition to date of publication. Also: look at annualized circulation rate from date of accession, in addition to total checkouts.

Constance mentioned a study done amongst the OhioLINK institutions that might be of interest to our project. The study is a usage analysis of books, based on circulation data. There is a breakdown by institutional type (all participants are academic libraries, but this includes community colleges to PhD granting institutions), and subject. More information about the analysis is available at http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/ohiolink/default.htm

In response to a question from Clem: total use was not compared to potential user population.

HathiTrust:
The Board encouraged us to pursue membership in the Hathi Trust. If we become members, we’ll have the ability to compare holdings against that database and provide our users with the ability to download PDF versions of public domain materials. We may be able to have a comparison report run (for a fee) if we are not members.  Another option would be to generate this report from WorldCat.

Bob indicated that a good study/publication could result from comparing the percentage of what’s on the shelf vs. what’s in the [shared] catalog report, probably from info compiled near an end point where we are actually making decisions on who keeps what and how many copies. E.g. 3,000 titles with 3 or more copies, found that X% were not available among the partner libraries.

Print-on-Demand (POD)
Questions to consider:

  • Will the POD service be available for everything in the archive, or just digital works?
  • How will this be indicated?
  • Where would EOD fit into all of this?
  • Q for Kathryn Harnish at OCLC: could POD availability be included in a WCA report?

Constance mentioned a UIUC project to send unique items for digitization; more information about that project is available at http://illinoisharvest.grainger.illinois.edu/results.asp?searchtype=collectioncontent&newsearch=1&collID=2797&collname=Project%20Unica; the contents do not appear to be in HathiTrust, but according to the project site “records of the books and the digital facsimiles are also available from institution’s online catalog, Illinois Harvest, and OCLC.”

Lizanne mentioned that there is a tension between the availability of a preserved copy and the preservation of it (do we really want to circulate the only copy being retained?). Need to think about how an electronic copy or a POD copy can be incorporated.

Q’s from the Project Team:
Q: Is anyone gathering current MOU’s and centralizing them?
A: yes, Lizanne is: available on the CRL site at http://www.crl.edu/archiving-preservation/print-archives/service-agreements

Q: re: distributed holdings; how is ownership established in record?
A: WEST: Ownership belongs to the archive holder, which is usually the original owner. If a volume is transferred, ownership transfers to the archiving entity. This can differ if the original owner is a state institution.
CIC – similar to WEST, although they call it “administrative control.”
This has been made a bit easier because volume count is less of an issue than it used to be (especially among ARL institutions).

Future meetings: The next meeting with the Advisory Board will be held in Maine sometime during May 2012. Valerie will send some possible dates.