Posts tagged under: Shared Print

From data to action: Leveraging insights to make more informed collection decisions

“How many books are there on Islamic law?”

This was the deceptively simple question posed by a colleague while brainstorming the potential scope of a digitization project on Islamic legal history. For non-librarians, it might seem like something one could just “look up.” But as you and I know, that kind of analysis only begins with a simple question and branches out into many more complex issues of data analysis, accounting for duplicate titles, different editions, and multiple languages, etc.

But I decided to give it a go and survey a selected number of libraries in North America using the tool Choreo Insights. I published the in-depth results of my findings in another post on the Islamic Law Blog, but today wanted to talk more about the process.

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Controlled digital lending: Past successes can guide our future

When the COVID-19 pandemic created barriers to traditional information access, library workers reacted immediately to help make up the difference. I don’t think I’ve talked to a single person whose library didn’t put forward major, sometimes dramatic efforts to ramp up “anytime, anywhere” access to resources. And that includes forays into controlled digital lending (CDL).

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The remarkable acceleration of shared print

shared_print_accelleration

Ten years ago, on February 22, 2008, fresh from a consulting project at a very crowded Davidson College Library, I drafted a first description of a “selective withdrawal system” for libraries. Back then I envisioned “an automated decision-support tool that assists libraries in weeding their print book collections intelligently and efficiently” and also noted that “deselection must be pursued with care, to assure that future scholars will have access to the scholarly and cultural record.”

If you had told me then that within ten short years, shared print programs would encompass more than 40 million long-term monograph retention commitments, I’d have doubted your sanity. There’s no way anyone could have predicted how quickly these programs would grow.

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Benchmarking print book collections: a beginning

Stacks of library books

The role of print books in academic libraries is changing, as it has been for more than a decade. Library and campus administrators are evaluating the role of locally held print collections in the library’s strategy and their contribution to user satisfaction and success.

The factors contributing to this discussion—declining print book use, changes in library spaces, redundancy across the “collective collection” and the cost of maintaining local collections—are well known. Increasingly, shared print monograph programs are seen as a way to provide continued access to the full range of titles, while distributing the costs of storage and management among a number of institutions.

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