Maine Shared Collections Cooperative Executive Committee
September 2, 2015
10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Attendees: Matthew Revitt, Joyce Rumery, Clem Guthro, Barbara McDade, Jamie Ritter, David Nutty
1. Retention commitment removal and transfer policy & procedures
In early July the MSCC Collections & Operations Committee met. The main topics of conversation were when and how many replacement copies should be sought for lost, damaged, superseded, and weeded MSCC committed to retain items. To avoid undermining the grant work, the Committee also discussed how removing commitments should only be for relatively small amounts of titles and how this should be communicated back to weeding library staff.
Barbara reported that Bangor Public Library had been conducting some weeding and that they had identified items with MSCC commitments which they felt could be weeded, for example, books on photography. Matthew responded that the Collections & Operations Committee had discussed how, for situations like the one Barbara mentioned, it would be left to the professional discretion of the Committee member to decide whether an item should be retained. However, reversing commitments should only be carried out on a limited title-by-title basis, not in large batches. Jamie was unsure why any commitments that had been recorded in catalogs would be reversed because he had presumed that the retention agreements had been developed following detailed analysis. Barbara responded that it had not been possible in the grant collection analysis to make retention decisions about individual titles, so some titles received commitments that wouldn’t have it as it wasn’t possible to carry out 3 million title-by-title reviews. Matthew commented that he had reminded the Collections & Operations Committee of their responsibility to remove commitments from local catalogs and OCLC, so they aren’t included in the MSCC collection analysis data.
Matthew noted that there are one-off situations like at the University of Southern Maine’s Osher Library, where some retention commitments don’t pass the reasonability test. David reported that a lot of the Osher titles committed to retain were non-cartography material and had only received a commitment by virtue of having a special collections location code (MSCS agreed to retain all print monograph items with a special collections code). Matthew commented that decisions like retaining all special collections copies may need to be looked at again in the next round of collection analysis (see below).
Matthew had emphasized at the Collections & Operations Committee meeting that one of the selling points of the MSCC collection analysis is that it allows libraries to identify titles they can weed safe in the knowledge they are being retained by another library, so it’s important to not undermine that security by excessively weeding items with commitments.
2. MSCC Collections & Operations Committee appointments
The Executive Committee approved the appointment of Evelyn A. Greenlaw (Head, Campus Library at the Lewiston-Auburn College at USM) as the replacement University of Southern Maine representative on the MSCC Collections & Operations Committee.
Matthew asked the Committee whether they still agreed it maked sense to have both the Collections & Operations Committee and Executive Committee made up of members from the grant partner institutions. Clem commented that he wouldn’t want to have to go through a process of changing the MSCC Memorandum of Understanding and by-laws when it had already been approved and signed by member institutions.
The Committee agreed to not make change to the membership of either the Collections & Operations Committee and Executive Committee.
Matthew asked the Committee whether they felt he should submit progress updates to the directors of MSCS grant partners who aren’t members of the Executive Committee, or whether their representatives on the Collections & Operations should just be expected to update them. Matthew confirmed for Joyce that he hadn’t circulated meeting minutes to other directors. Clem suggested Matthew send annual updates to the non-Executive Committee MSCS library directors.
3. Future analysis & review of commitments
Another discussion at the Collections & Operations Committee meeting had been the requirement in the MSCC MOU to review MSCC retention commitments every five years. The Collections & Operations Committee felt the review should take place in 2019 which will be five years since the first set of analysis. The Collections & Operations Committee analysis also felt the review and analysis should include commitments made by new member libraries and those titles owned by the grant partners which were published or added post-2003 and were out of scope for the grant collection analysis. MSCC will still need to decide if there is a cut off period for analysis: e.g. only titles published pre-2008. The Collections & Operations Committee have already started a new list of publishers to remove commitments on titles it is not appropriate to commit to retain.
Matthew commented that even though 2019 is still a long way off, the Executive Committee will eventually need to agree on how MSCC funds the collection analysis and whether it spreads the costs across the membership. Obviously, a lot will depend on which collection analysis tool or service MSCC uses. Matthew doubted whether MSCC could afford to contract with SCS again and thought it more likely that MSCC would seek Sara Amato’s assistance.
Clem commented that 5 years is still a long time away, with a lot of unknowns, and that by then there might be other tools and services available to MSCC (e.g. Intota and GreenGlass for groups). David agreed that there are a lot of variables, but that it also made sense to start thinking about the analysis now.
4. Project updates
a. IMLS final report submission & project completion
Matthew submitted MSCS’s final report to IMLS in April. Matthew and Deb received some positive comments back from IMLS about MSCS’s work amongst some questions about why MSCS hadn’t spent $500,000 in matching funds, which resulted in a frantic couple of hours, but eventually it was just a case of the University of Maine grant office needing to submit additional data about partner institutions matching funds in salaries and wages.
Matthew also had to send IMLS an email stating the reasons why approximately $3,500 of grant funds went unspent. The reason Matthew gave was that MSCS were able to fulfill the objectives of the program in the amount expended.
Deb received the good news from IMLS in early August that the MSCS grant had closed out and all of the terms and conditions were met.
b. On-demand services — stats, record reload for Colby & UMaine, State of Maine documents & HathiTrust record move to URSUS
Stats
Matthew has been compiling and publicizing monthly stats for the top ten viewed on-demand titles in MaineCat. The stats have generated some positive feedback from libraries, particularly because of the interesting range of titles that feature in the list. To get in the top ten a record only needs to be viewed twice, but that’s probably to be expected with the nature of the material and the fact that there are 1.4 million on-demand records in MaineCat. Matthew confirmed for David that the list of top ten viewed titles is published monthly on the MSCC website (see August’s top ten).
The number of MaineCat Print-On-Demand service requests received continues to be low. Since the service went back online in December 2014 there has still only been one request! Matthew felt the price of books is too high to compete with commercial vendors. Barbara commented that some of her patrons are able to use the digital versions.
Record reload for Colby & UMaine
HathiTrust require member institutions to annually send updated holdings data so they can calculate fees and access. Alisia Revitt (Maine InfoNet) compiled and submitted UMaine’s data and Sara completed Colby’s data extract.
Before Jeremy York left HathiTrust, Matthew asked him whether they would reconsider accepting Maine Shared Collections as a consortial member. Mike Furlough, HathiTrust Executive Director confirmed that they are still not willing to accept Maine Shared Collections as a consortial member.
State of Maine documents
Peggy O’Kane (Maine State Library) worked with HathiTrust to have State of Maine documents added to the public domain, so they are accessible in the digital collection. Deb Rollins has also been working with the UMaine College of Natural Sciences, Forestry, & Agriculture to have some of their documents added to the HathiTrust.
Matthew has been speaking to HathiTrust about updating the Maine collection that was created during the grant.
HathiTrust record move to URSUS
The on-demand records are currently in Solar; Alisia Revitt (Maine InfoNet) will move the records to their new home in URSUS by the end of September. The records will include newly added public domain material, including the items Peggy worked on (see above).
c. Future changes to process for recording commitments in OCLC
OCLC are doing away with the requirement for a second shared print symbol. OCLC recognize that the need for a second symbol for a separate ILL process for shared print items is not necessary. Also, with the current model you can’t see a register of existing shared print commitments from multiple programs and some of the data is not machine readable. OCLC’s goal is to make the work of recording commitments both in WordCat and local catalogs more automated and to include this as part of a suite of shared print services libraries would subscribe to.
OCLC have established a Shared Print Advisory Council to provide advice on changes to the process for recording retention information. Matthew being co-organizer of the Print Archive Network (PAN) sessions has been appointed to the Council which has been operating for about a year.
Matthew has spoken with Katie Birch (OCLC) about the transition to their new model and she confirmed that OCLC will convert MSCC’s current retention commitments using the second symbol to the new registration free of charge. MSCC will be likely be included in a pilot project for the new process which will run from January – Spring 2016.
While Kate reassured Matthew that the new model won’t affect Sara’s ability to use the OCLC API for MSCC’s collection analysis, both Matthew and Sara will speak with OCLC about this further at a meeting on Friday September 4th 2015.
d. MSCC collection analysis update – new libraries & marketing
New libraries
26 libraries are in various stages of the MSCC collection analysis process and there are approximately 10 other libraries who are interested in participating, but are waiting for funding and/or the end of summer.
Just over 1/3 of all Minerva libraries have signed up, and for some like school and hospital libraries it’s probably not going to be relevant.
In terms of URSUS, University of Maine at Machias need to get funding approval and Matthew hasn’t received a response from the School of Law. The Law and Legislative Library weren’t willing to join MSCC because of the language regarding fees in the MOU.
A couple of libraries have said they can’t afford the collection analysis fee and the University of New England is not interested at this time. For libraries that can’t participate in the full analysis there is the option to work with Matthew on self-nominating titles for retention; Southwest Harbor are working on this.
Matthew presented a summary spreadsheet of the analysis so far. The spreadsheet showed how there have been plenty of weeding opportunities of titles owned locally that already have a Maine Shared Collections retention commitment at another library. An average of 38% of in-scope monograph titles have an existing MSCC retention commitment at another library, ranging from a high of 66% at UMaine Presque Isle to 22% at Witherle.
Barbara was surprised that larger public libraries hadn’t signed up for the collection analysis. Matthew commented that he would expect those libraries to have large numbers of both weeding and retention commitment candidates.
Marketing
Matthew is very pleased with the number of libraries that have taken part so far. Matthew’s hopes to recruit 1-2 new libraries per month, to reach this goal he has been heavily marketing MSCC via email, social media, and listservs and at library events.
Mathew felt that extending MSCC beyond the relatively larger Minerva and Koha libraries is probably going to require grant funding because the analysis fee of $350 will be cost prohibitive and there’s probably going to be extra analytical work Sara would need to get paid for. Matthew has previously spoken to Janet McKenny (Maine State Library) about grant funding support to support the analysis work and the data cleanup work using the files Sara produced containing incorrect OCLC and ISBN numbers which individual libraries aren’t in a position to fix themselves.
e. New MSCC member libraries update –- additional commitments made, retention criteria, shelf checking & adding retention statements
New MSCC member libraries
Of the 26 libraries that have gone through the collection analysis, 14 have formally joined the Maine Shared Collections Cooperative which means membership has more than doubled over the last 12 months. Most new public library members are from the southern district of Maine. The remaining libraries that have gone through the collection analysis still need to get the MOU signed.
Matthew has spoken to James Jackson Sanborn (Maine InfoNet) about having adding a “library” in MILS for MSCC libraries that don’t otherwise contribute holdings which would only include holdings for titles the libraries have agreed to retain; James is going to look into this further.
Additional commitments made
Of those 14 new members, 12 have agreed to retain a combined total of 905 titles. The majority of titles retained are local fiction and history titles. The University of Maine Fort Kent also has a lot of rare material in their Acadian Collection.
Retention criteria
Rarity is the main reason why a title is considered a retention candidate. On average less than 1% of a library’s print monograph collection are titles where there are fewer than 10 holdings of in OCLC and only a subset of those are actually identified as MSCC retention candidates. The numbers of titles involved are just enough that libraries feel good about having rare and interesting titles in their collection, but not enough that retaining them on their shelf for 15 years would be too onerous.
Shelf checking
Some of the new MSCC member libraries are going to the shelf to check a title is actually there before agreeing to a retention commitment.
Adding retention statements
Matthew has been adding retention commitment statements in Sierra for Minerva and URSUS libraries including the validation note. The validation note is another first for Maine Shared Collections as no other shared print project has recorded validation for monographs.
Sharon Fitzgerald and her team continue to add statements to OCLC for those libraries with OCLC cataloguing subscriptions. OCLC tried to charge UMaine Augusta and Central Maine Community College the ILL subscription fee which MSCC had a long standing agreement not to be charged for, but Matthew had Bill Carney (OCLC) resolve this issue.
f. Display of retention commitments in MaineCat
Using a workaround Sara devised, retention information only appears in MaineCat because a script that pulls information from OCLC. Albie Dunn (Maine InfoNet) is working on getting the retention information to instead flow from local catalogs to MaineCat and also a script to get the retention note to display in MaineCat. This has become possible with the most recent update of Sierra. This will mean all commitments will be displayed in MaineCat not just those recorded in OCLC.
The Collections & Operations Committee agreed that the MaineCat appearance should remain the same.
g. MSCC involvement in EAST & HathiTrust
EAST
Colby and the other Eastern Academic Scholars Trust (EAST) members have begun data extracts for their collection analysis. SCS are also pulling MSCS retention commitment data from OCLC so the commitments can be used as a factor in the analysis similarly to the way MSCS used overlap with HathiTrust.
Matthew has been speaking to Judy Russell (Dean of Florida University Libraries) about their agriculture journal shared print project in the ACRL region and the possibility of recreating this is in the northeast with EAST who will eventually be analyzing journals and serials. Based on an overlap analysis Matthew carried there are a number of agriculture titles even just in the MSCC group that ACRL don’t currently have retention commitments for.
HathiTrust
The HathiTrust Shared Print Task Force that Clem and Matthew sat on has completed its charge and HathiTrust are working on implementing the Task Force’s recommendations. As members of the HathiTrust, both UMaine and Colby by default will become members of the shared print program, but aren’t obligated to make retention commitments.
5. Next meeting date
The Committee’s next meeting will be in March 2016. Matthew will send out a Doodle Poll closer to the date.
The Committee agreed that their meetings will continue to be held virtually rather than in-person.
6. AOB
Matthew confirmed for David that the MSCS grant partner libraries have no ongoing financial commitments to MSCC. Matthew explained how the MSCC cost of collection analysis services is based on the time it takes to complete the data extracts and compile the spreadsheets, so the larger the collection the more time it will take to run the comparisons. For libraries with a collection size of under 50,000 print monograph volumes then it will cost $350. Between 50,000 and 100,000 volumes then it will cost $420. The libraries are sent an invoice by Maine InfoNet and Sara in turn bills Maine InfoNet for her time.