A Marking Heuristic for Materials in a Shared Print Agreement

Abstract

S pace is at a premium in research libraries. More institutions and their governing bodies look to repurpose footprints once devoted to stacks and to find ways to allow for the maintenance of retrospective physical collections in a time of increasing emphasis on social collaboration and reliance on digital technologies. The lack of space is coupled with tightening budgets, a growing realization of the costs of maintaining print materials in open stacks, and the growing acceptance of digital surrogates (and born-digital resources) across academic disciplines. As such, academic libraries are turning to more cooperative forms of collection management, particularly for large print serial runs but also for low-use monographic collections. There is a growing corpus of literature describing these plans, their ontologies, organizational structures, and primary considerations for institutions considering initiating such projects. However, despite the robust literature and online program documentation available for review and emulation, many practicalities are rarely covered, articulated, or even defined.One such practicality is the need for additional marking of items identified in a shared print agreement. Minimal information exists on basic benchmarks or best practices or even a minimum standard proposed in the literature, and there is a corresponding lack of recommendations or descriptions in program documentation from many regional and national shared print agreements. This paper advocates for the need to consider marking in shared print agreements and establishes a heuristic to guide decision makers when crafting or amending policies in shared print agreements. Using a systematic analysis of the needs of shared print programs and rationales for marking, this paper demonstrates that traditional marking concerns are still relevant, if not more so, in an era of electronic resources and last-resort copies; it highlights the major considerations for such additional marking, proposes possible explanations to account for the lack of practicalities in both the literature and in project documentation, and poses areas for further consideration and research.

A Model to Determine Optimal Numbers of Monograph Copies for Preservation in Shared Print Collections

“…Shared print is often seen as a way in which libraries can alleviate pressure on library physical spaces while preserving the scholarly record. 10 Libraries can deaccession local copies based on the presence of a committed copy held elsewhere, reducing costs without eliminating access. Horava describes a future in which libraries relieve themselves of reputations based on the size of their owned collection and focus on what is accessible to their users.…”