Stewardship of the evolving scholarly record: from the invisible hand to conscious coordination

The scholarly record is increasingly digital and networked, while at the same time expanding in both the volume and diversity of the material it contains. The long-term future of the scholarly record cannot be effectively secured with traditional stewardship models developed for print materials. This report describes the key features of future stewardship models adapted to the characteristics of a digital, networked scholarly record, and discusses some practical implications of implementing these models. Key highlights include: As the scholarly record continues to evolve, conscious coordination will become an important organizing principle for stewardship models. Past stewardship models were built on an "invisible hand" approach that relied on the uncoordinated, institution-scale efforts of individual academic libraries acting autonomously to maintain local collections. Future stewardship of the evolving scholarly record requires conscious coordination of context, commitments, specialization, and reciprocity. With conscious coordination, local stewardship efforts leverage scale by collecting more of less. Keys to conscious coordination include right-scaling consolidation, cooperation, and community mix. Reducing transaction costs and building trust facilitate conscious coordination. Incentives to participate in cooperative stewardship activities should be linked to broader institutional priorities. The long-term future of the scholarly record in its fullest expression cannot be effectively secured with stewardship strategies designed for print materials. The features of the evolving scholarly record suggest that traditional stewardship strategies, built on an “invisible hand” approach that relies on the uncoordinated, institution-scale efforts of individual academic libraries acting autonomously to maintain local collections, is no longer suitable for collecting, organizing, making available, and preserving the outputs of scholarly inquiry. As the scholarly record continues to evolve, conscious coordination will become an important organizing principle for stewardship models. Conscious coordination calls for stewardship strategies that incorporate a broader awareness of the system-wide stewardship context; declarations of explicit commitments around portions of the local collection; formal divisions of labor within cooperative arrangements; and robust networks for reciprocal access. Stewardship strategies based on conscious coordination involve an acceleration of an already perceptible transition away from relatively autonomous local collections to ones built on networks of cooperation across many organizations, within and outside the traditional cultural heritage community

Operationalizing the BIG Collective Collection: A Case Study of Consolidation vs Autonomy

This is a discussion paper prepared in collaboration with the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Library Initiatives. It presents a framework for operationalizing the BTAA collective collection. A collective collection is a collection managed collaboratively across a network of libraries. We have a very specific focus in this paper on the ”purchased” or print collection, acknowledging that other areas of library collections are sometimes managed collectively, digitized collections for example. The BTAA justifiably claims to be the premier academic collaboration in the US. Once described as “the world\u27s greatest common market in education3,” it leverages the combined research and teaching capacity of major research universities to scale innovation, impact, and economies across its 14 members. Together, the BTAA members have a profound social and economic impact throughout a large part of the US. Libraries are a central part of the BTAA research, learning, and teaching endeavor. They collectively mobilize major expertise and resources. In fact, the BTAA collection represents more than a fifth of all titles in the North American print book collection. The BTAA libraries align with BTAA goals by collaborating at scale to increase both impact and efficiency. The character of library spaces, services, and collections is evolving with changing learning and research behaviors. It is widely recognized that continued autonomous development of large standalone collections does not meet needs and is not efficient. A library cannot collect all that its members would like to see, and much of what it does collect does not get used. At the same time, library space is being configured around engagement rather than around collections, the long-term stewardship costs of print materials are being recognized, and the role of books in research and learning is changing. Libraries are re-evaluating traditional approaches to building, managing, and sharing collections, and are increasingly looking to do this cooperatively. In this paper, we define and explore key attributes of collective collections and present a series of recommendations designed to advance the BTAA libraries toward a more purposeful coordination of their collections. Doing all that we propose would involve an extensive multi-year program. The approach we recommend here is broadly applicable in other consortium settings as well, which is why we characterize the paper as a case study

Storage of legacy print collections: the views of Australasian university librarians

This paper reports on the results of a qualitative survey conducted with seven managers of university libraries from Australia and New Zealand. The purpose of the survey was to explore both library responses to, and librarians’ attitudes towards, issues related to the long-term storage and management of legacy print collections. There is a focus on issues related to future planning for print storage, including the prospects for collaborative storage; the balance between on-site and off-site storage; the impact of mass-digitisation programs; and the desirability of collaboration outside the university library sector

Cloud-sourcing research collections: Managing print in the mass-digitized library environment

The emergence of a mass-digitized book corpus has the potential to transform the academic library enterprise, enabling an optimization of legacy print collections that will substantially increase the efficiency of library operations and facilitate a redirection of library resources in support of a renovated library service portfolio. Executive Summary The Cloud Library project was jointly designed and executed by OCLC Research, the HathiTrust, New York University’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, and the Research Collections Access & Preservation (ReCAP) consortium, with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The objective of the project was to examine the feasibility of outsourcing management of low-use print books held in academic libraries to shared service providers, including large-scale print and digital repositories. The following overarching hypothesis provided a framework for our investigation: • The emergence of a mass-digitized book corpus has the potential to transform the academic library enterprise, enabling an optimization of legacy print collections that will substantially increase the efficiency of library operations and facilitate a redirection of library resources in support of a renovated library service portfolio. From this, a number of research questions emerged: • What is the scope of the mass-digitized book corpus in the HathiTrust Digital Libray and to what degree does it replicate print collections held in academic research libraries? • Can public domain content in the HathiTrust Digital Library provide a suitable surrogate for low-use print collections in academic libraries? • Is there sufficient duplication between shared print storage repositories and the HathiTrust Digital Library to permit a significant number of academic libraries to optimize and reduce total spending on local print management operations? • What operational gains might be obtained through a selective externalization of collection management activities? Based on a year-long study of data from the HathiTrust, ReCAP, and WorldCat, we concluded that our central hypothesis was successfully confirmed: there is sufficient material in the mass-digitized library collection managed by the HathiTrust to duplicate a sizeable (and growing) portion of virtually any academic library in the United States, and there is adequate duplication between the shared digital repository and large-scale print storage facilities to enable a great number of academic libraries to reconsider their local print management operations. Significantly, we also found that the combination of a relatively small number of potential shared print providers, including the Library of Congress, was sufficient to achieve more than 70% coverage of the digitized book collection, suggesting that shared service may not require a very large network of providers. Analysis of the distribution of subject matter and library holdings represented in the HathiTrust Digital Library and shared print repositories further confirmed that the digital corpus is largely representative of the collective academic library collection, suggesting a broad potential market for service. A further positive finding was that monographic titles in the humanities constitute the greatest part of the mass-digitized resource, which may indicate that some relatively under-resourced disciplines will begin to benefit from a digital transformation that has already powered enormous innovation in the sciences. As detailed below, we also found that substantial library space savings and cost avoidance could be achieved if academic institutions outsourced management of redundant low-use inventory to shared service providers. Our findings also revealed some important obstacles and limitations to implementing changed print management practices in the current library operating environment. The following are among the most important constraints we identified: • The proportion of public domain content in the HathiTrust Digital Library is relatively small (approximately 16% of titles in June 2010) and typically represents material that is not widely held in the library system; as a result, the number of libraries that might hope to reduce local print management costs for these titles through negotiated agreements with the HathiTrust and shared print providers is quite low. Moreover, the age and subject distribution of titles in the public domain is not representative of academic research collections as a whole. In sum, the public domain corpus as currently defined by U.S. copyright law cannot be considered a viable surrogate for any academic print collection. • While significant duplication was found between the HathiTrust Digital Library and multiple large-scale library storage collections, it was apparent that no single print storage repository could offer coverage sufficient to enable significant space savings or cost avoidance for a given client library. Put another way, effective shared print storage solutions will depend upon a network of providers who will need to optimize holdings as a collective resource. • The absence of a robust discovery and delivery service based on collective print storage holdings is an impediment to changed print management strategies, especially for digitized titles in copyright. It is our strong conviction, based on the above findings, that academic libraries in the United States (and elsewhere) should mobilize the resources and leadership necessary to implement a bridge strategy that will maximize the return on years of investment in library print collections while acknowledging the rapid shift toward online provisioning and consumption of information. Even, and perhaps especially, in advance of any legal outcome on the Google Book Search settlement, academic libraries have a unique opportunity to reconfigure print supply chains to ensure continued library relevance in the print supply chain. In the absence of a licensing option, online access to most of the digitized retrospective literature will be severely constrained. Demand for print versions of digitized books will continue to exist and libraries will be motivated to meet it, but they will need to do so in more cost-effective ways. In the absence of fully available online editions, full-text indexing of digitized in-copyright material provides a means of moderating and tuning demand for print versions and should facilitate the transfer of an increasing part of the print inventory to high-density warehouses. Viewed in this light, shared print storage repositories could enable a significant and positive shift in library resources toward a more distinctive and institutionally relevant service portfolio

Operationalizing the BIG Collective Collection: A Case Study of Consolidation vs Autonomy

This is a discussion paper prepared in collaboration with the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Library Initiatives. It presents a framework for operationalizing the BTAA collective collection. A collective collection is a collection managed collaboratively across a network of libraries. We have a very specific focus in this paper on the ”purchased” or print collection, acknowledging that other areas of library collections are sometimes managed collectively, digitized collections for example. The BTAA justifiably claims to be the premier academic collaboration in the US. Once described as “the world\u27s greatest common market in education3,” it leverages the combined research and teaching capacity of major research universities to scale innovation, impact, and economies across its 14 members. Together, the BTAA members have a profound social and economic impact throughout a large part of the US. Libraries are a central part of the BTAA research, learning, and teaching endeavor. They collectively mobilize major expertise and resources. In fact, the BTAA collection represents more than a fifth of all titles in the North American print book collection. The BTAA libraries align with BTAA goals by collaborating at scale to increase both impact and efficiency. The character of library spaces, services, and collections is evolving with changing learning and research behaviors. It is widely recognized that continued autonomous development of large standalone collections does not meet needs and is not efficient. A library cannot collect all that its members would like to see, and much of what it does collect does not get used. At the same time, library space is being configured around engagement rather than around collections, the long-term stewardship costs of print materials are being recognized, and the role of books in research and learning is changing. Libraries are re-evaluating traditional approaches to building, managing, and sharing collections, and are increasingly looking to do this cooperatively. In this paper, we define and explore key attributes of collective collections and present a series of recommendations designed to advance the BTAA libraries toward a more purposeful coordination of their collections. Doing all that we propose would involve an extensive multi-year program. The approach we recommend here is broadly applicable in other consortium settings as well, which is why we characterize the paper as a case study

Toward a New Understanding of American Higher Education Institutions: Focus of Educational Offer, Mode of Provision - Preview Literature Review

The OCLC Research Library Partnership Web Archiving Metadata Working Group (WAM) was formed to recommend descriptive metadata best practices for archived web content. When the group began its work early in 2016, we discovered that metadata practitioners had high hopes that it would be possible to extract descriptive metadata from harvested content.This report offers our objective analysis of 11 tools in pursuit of an answer to that question. We reviewed selected web harvesting tools to determine their descriptive metadata functionalities. The question we sought to answer was this: Can web harvesting tools automatically generate descriptive metadata that supports the discoverability of archived web resources? Auto-generation of descriptive metadata for archived web resources could result in significant gains in the efficiency of data entry and thus help enable metadata production at scale.  Our intent was twofold: 1) provide the web archiving community with a description of each relevant tool's overall purpose and metadata-related capabilities, and 2) inform WAM's overarching objective of preparing best practice recommendations for web archiving descriptive metadata based on an understanding of user needs.

Strength in Numbers: The Research Libraries UK (RLUK) Collective Collection

Research libraries are exploring opportunities to cooperatively address areas of mutual need, including collection management and the long-term stewardship of the legacy print investment. Analysis of collective collections is a valuable source of insight and intelligence to support planning in an environment where libraries seek to create value through collective action and shared capacities. In partnership with Research Libraries UK (RLUK), OCLC Research has produced a detailed characterization of the collective collection of the RLUK membership, with special emphasis on print books. This report examines the size, scope, and overlap patterns of the RLUK collective collection, supplemented with additional perspective from comparison to the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) collective collection and the global library system as a whole. This study is of particular interest to the RLUK membership, but is also relevant to any group of higher education institutions engaged in, or planning, cooperative efforts around their collections

The Transformation of Academic Library Collecting: A Synthesis of the Harvard Librarys Hazen Memorial Symposium

In October 2016, a group of eminent library leaders, research collections specialists and scholars gathered at Norton's Woods Conference Center in Cambridge, MA, to commemorate the career of Dan Hazen (1947–2015) and reflect upon the transformation of academic library collections. Hazen was a towering figure in the world of research collections management and was personally known to many attendees; his impact on the profession of academic librarianship and the shape of research collections is widely recognized and continues to shape practice and policy in major research libraries.Drawing from presentations and audience discussions at The Transformation of Academic Library Collecting: A Symposium Inspired by Dan C. Hazen, this publication examines of some central themes important to a broader conversation about the future of academic library collections, in particular, collective collections and the reimagination of what have traditionally been called "special" and archival collections (now referred to as unique and distinctive collections).The publication also includes a foreword about Dan Hazen and his work by Sarah E. Thomas, Vice President for the Harvard Library and University Librarian & Roy E. Larsen Librarian for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.The Transformation of Academic Library Collecting: A Synthesis of the Harvard Library's Hazen Memorial Symposium is not only a tribute to Hazen's impact on the academic library community, but also a primer on where academic library collections could be headed in the future, and is a must read for anyone interested in library collection trends

Right-scaling Stewardship: A Multi-scale Perspective on Cooperative Print Management

The goal of this report is to provide an empirically-based assessment, based on WorldCat bibliographic and holdings data, of the size, scope, and salient features of these collections, with special attention to identifying and characterizing segments consisting of relatively scarce and relatively widely-held materials. The analysis also employs a subject-based approach to identifying distinctive collecting strengths at both the local and consortial level, and examines network demand for the consortial print resource using WorldCat Resource Sharing inter-lending data. Insights and findings drawn from the analysis are discussed, which help map the territory of cooperative print strategies organized as a regionally-scaled collaboration. In particular, the findings highlight how scale shapes the scope and depth of the collective print resource; the degrees of redundancy and distinctiveness attached to that collective resource at both local and consortial level; and the scope of cooperation needed to achieve reasonable thresholds of coverage and access. The report also addresses how "right-scaling" stewardship of the collective print investment lies at the center of any shared print strategy, in the sense of determining which materials are best managed at the local level, which are best moved into some form of shared stewardship infrastructure, and the appropriate scale at which collective management should take place.This work is an output of our activity, Right-scaling Stewardship: A System-wide Perspective on Print Books in the CIC which falls under our work agenda theme of Understanding the System-wide Library. It extends earlier work on regionally-based shared print collections reported in Print Management at "Mega-scale": A Regional Perspective on Print Book Collections in North America, available at: http://oclc.org/content/dam/research/publications/library/2012/2012-05.pdf.This report will be of interest to libraries investigating or implementing shared, group-scale approaches to managing print book collections. The analysis and findings of the report will help to support a growing number of institutions that are broadening the scope of existing shared print programs from journals to monographic resources. While the case study focuses on research-intensive university libraries in the United States, the findings will be of interest to all libraries transitioning from operating models based on local collection management, toward models that leverage economies of scale