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Our 2012 mega-regions analysis revealed a notable feature of the library landscape in North America:  the apparent  scarcity of print inventory varies significantly depending upon the scale at which it is assessed.  It stands to reason, of course, that a title held by a single library in one locale may be held by many libraries in other places.  What is more surprising is that scarcity – or what is more appropriately termed diffusion – is a characteristic that persists even at the scale of the mega-region.  In every one of the 12 regions we examined, more than 75% of the print book titles are held by five or fewer libraries.  Yet, comparing one mega-region to another, we found a high level of bilateral duplication:  for example, more than 70% of the print book publications held in Cascadia – a mega-region encompassing urban centers in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia – are duplicated by library holdings in the NorCal region.

Bi-lateral duplication of print books in Cascadia and NorCal

Now it may be the high degree of integration that is a primary characteristic of mega-regions is also a factor in the diffusion of library resources within those same regions.  Arguably, the strong networks of exchange and robust logistics infrastructure of mega-regions help to explain why we find such a low level of redundancy in library collections within those regions.  Even without coordinated collection development plans, it may be that the ease with which resources (including library books) flow within mega-regions exercises some influence on library acquisitions.  The incentive to acquire ‘just in case’ inventory will be less in a region where inter-lending networks are strong and it relatively easy to obtain copies from neighboring institutions, and this confidence in regional supply options may have a sort of invisible-hand effect that constrains redundant acquisitions.

This would suggest that the high degree of diffusion we see in regional collections – inventory distributed across a number of geographically distant institutions – is a characteristic of a ‘well-organized’ (though not deliberately engineered) library system.  By contrast, library collections in institutions located outside of mega-regions tends to exhibit a higher degree of redundancy.  This is partly a reflection of the large number of libraries that fall outside of the defined mega-regions – more than nine thousand individual OCLC institution symbols – but it seems likely that greater redundancy is needed to support demand in regions where ‘flows’ may be less efficient.   Compare the average library holdings per title for collections held outside of US mega-regions (about 14) to the ratio of holdings per title within mega-regions, which ranges from 2 to 9, for the Phoenix metro area and Chi-Pitts respectively.

Of course, there are other factors at play:  as a recent New York Times article showed, the geographic distribution of major research universities (and the libraries that serve them) is uneven – and regions with fewer research libraries will have a smaller concentration of rare or unique materials, compared to regions with many research intensive universities.  Not surprisingly, the BosWash region, which encompasses a substantial part of the ARL membership, has a relatively low level of redundancy in print book holdings (about 7 holdings per title) simply because the area is home to many institutions with large collections of rare or distinctive materials.

ARL Membership Map (2013)

Conversely, in areas with a high density of public libraries — which generally hold large collections of popular classics and best-selling titles — we see higher levels of overall redundancy in collections.  So one cannot infer that low levels of redundancy in library holdings across any region, whether organized against the mega-regions framework or anything else, are a reliable indicator of strong or weak flows.  Other regional factors, like the distribution of research universities and public libraries are clearly important.  It is interesting then to consider how the flow of library resources across regions may contribute to the organization of the library system as a whole.   Regional infrastructure will affect flows — but flows will also shape infrastructure.  Think, for example, of how the growth of rapid transit networks has transformed urban landscapes, encouraging the emergence of the sprawling metro areas that anchor mega-regions.

Lorcan Dempsey sometimes speaks of ‘library logistics’ and it is in this context that I have been thinking about the flow of library resources and more especially about the emergence of new hubs around which the library system is now being reconfigured.  Thom Hickey’s recent experiments in programmatically identifying concentrations of material related to a particular topic or identity — what we’ve referred to as ‘centers data’ – provide a new way to think about how the library system is organized and how it is changing.  It’s not clear if the existing centers reflect intentionally cultivated strengths in institutional holdings, or if they are merely accidents of history – an unsolicited donation of materials about a particular person, for instance.

In some cases, the association with known institutional centers of excellence seems evident:  it is not surprising, for example, to find that the University of Pittsburgh has the largest collection of material by or about Gonzalo Rojas, a celebrated Chilean poet.  Pitt has been a National Resource Center on Latin America for decades and it stands to reason they hold significant collections of Latin American literature.  Would an expert in the field have predicted that Pitt, rather than the University of Texas (a distinguished center of Latin American studies), has the most comprehensive collection related to Rojas?  Perhaps – I don’t have the domain knowledge to have an informed opinion about the likely location of the most comprehensive Latin American poetry collections in North America. Significantly, though, Pitt ranks within the top collections (by size) of works by related poets:

Gonzalo Rojas and related identities – University of Pittsburgh holdings ranked against other WorldCat libraries

As the figures here suggest, it is possible for a library to be a leading — or even the top-ranked–  ‘center’ of resources related to particular identity or topic without holding a vast number of titles.  This will obviously be true when the relevant oeuvre is limited:  to hold 100% of a small published record (a handful of titles, let’s say) is still significant.  What is more interesting is that the diffusion of library resources — the ‘scarcity’ that we find in institutional and within regional collections — effectively lowers the threshold for what constitutes excellence in institutional holdings.  In the example of Gonzalo Rojas, for example, Pitt’s 48 titles amount to less than 40% of the published works associated with the related VIAF heading.  Even so, this small collection is 75% larger (and 16% more comprehensive) than the related holdings at the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile — at least as they are reflected in WorldCat.  This is, at least to me, somewhat surprising.

This raises the question of how centers or hubs are revealed in the information environment.  Effective disclosure of collections that are distinctive not because of their rarity but because of their ‘excellence’ or completeness will be important if libraries are to be recognized as preferred hubs in the larger supply chain, where commercial providers are still dominant.  Ideally, one would like to have relevant library suppliers revealed in the network at the point of need, in the flow of the researcher’s work – which is increasingly likely to be outside the library discovery environment.  How could this be done?  Where do library fulfillment options fit in the knowledge graph? Somewhere in the Wikipedia infobox?   In Google’s info cards?  Happily, greater minds than mine are working on this problem.  Of one thing, at least, I’m certain:  understanding and representing the relationships between identities and topics in institutional and in regional collections – understanding how different ‘centers’ are related – will lead to new insights about how the library system is, and will be, organized.

Approximate location of maximum subsidence in the United States.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gwsanjoaquin.jpg

There’s been a lot of attention to geologic subsidence of late, what with all the sinkholes opening up in Florida, Louisiana and other places. Here in California, we are more often concerned with the gradual change in ground level due to the draining of aquifers that support large-scale farming.  From year to year, the difference in ground level may be nearly imperceptible but over the space of a few decades the landscape has been radically transformed.

The subsidence metaphor was on my mind recently, as I was looking over some data compiled by my colleague Thom Hickey, documenting the usage of headings (subjects and names) in WorldCat. OCLC Research has done quite a lot of work exploring new approaches to managing subject and name authorities, notably in VIAF and FAST. I was interested to see how Thom’s data might be used to measure change — uplift and subsidence — in the library landscape. By computing the frequency with which FAST and VIAF headings occur in institutional collections cataloged in WorldCat, one can identify which libraries hold the most materials related to particular topics, places and people.  And this in turn provides a measure of the relative distinctiveness of library collections, judged not in terms of the ‘rarity’ of holdings but rather by the concentration of related content.

It  seemed to me that Thom’s data might have something interesting to say about how the emergence of large-scale digitized book aggregations – HathiTrust, Google Books, etc — is altering the library environment.  It stands to reason that as these large hubs begin to consolidate content sourced from libraries (and, in Google’s case, publishers), they will displace traditional library ‘centers of excellence’ in some subject areas.  Those who remember the DLF Aquifer project will recall that the initial prototype was designed to pool digitized resources in a given subject area (initially American History, later narrowed to Abraham Lincoln and the US Civil War).  In the very large aggregations of HathiTrust and GoogleBooks, subject specialization has emerged more gradually.  There has not been much public attention to measuring the scope of subject-based collections within those aggregations, nor to benchmarking them against existing institutional holdings.*

The FAST and VIAF centers data provide evidence of both subsidence and uplift in the current collections environment — that is, shifts in centers of excellence as measured by scope of subject based holdings.  The ‘re-leveling’ that has been wrought in just a few years of large-scale digitization is already significant.  Digital aggregations have, by design or accident, emerged as important subject repositories that rival and even outrank some of the largest institutional libraries in WorldCat.

For instance,  HathiTrust, an organization not yet five years old, already holds the greatest concentration of titles on the topic of marine biology, surpassing the Library of Congress as well as two major research universities with world-class oceanography programs.

In the case of Marine biology, the difference between the number of titles held by HathiTrust and the Library of Congress is not very large — fewer than 200 titles.  But in other instances, the relative subsidence of traditional centers of excellence is more dramatic.  For instance, Google Books substantially outranks several major research libraries in holdings related to Russian periodicals (journals, newspapers and the like).

This represents an important change in the library system, with monumental old hubs being progressively overshadowed by new collections that are produced not by the slow accretion of library acquisitions but by large-scale digitization and (re)aggregation.  It provides a compelling illustration of how Web-scale content aggregations are altering the library operating environment.  In the case of HathiTrust especially, this disruption can (and I think should) be seen as a positive change:  it enables libraries to rethink traditional, institution-scale collection management and stewardship — a topic we examined in our Cloud-sourcing Research Collections report some years ago.

Using Thom’s ‘centers’ data, we can identify hundreds of topics and identities for which HathiTrust offers better coverage than any other library in WorldCat.  Here a few topics in which the Digital Library distinguishes itself:

And a few of the personal names for which its coverage is unrivaled:

Interestingly, the other top-ranked collections (by size) for these same subjects and identities are not always the source of HathiTrust’s richness.  One might have anticipated that Hathi’s leadership was simply a by-product of aggregating content from existing centers of excellence, but in fact Hathi has developed unexpected strengths by aggregating at a very large scale from a diverse pool of contributors.  For example, Harvard University and the University of Michigan each hold sizable collections of works by the poet Jean Ingelow; yet, the richness of Hathi’s Ingelow collection is mostly due to contributions from campus libraries in the University of California system.

The FAST and VIAF ‘centers’ data provide a fascinating new vantage point on the changing collections landscape.  We’ll be looking at ways to integrate it into ongoing research projects, including the mega-regions work, where we hope it can help us detect regional collecting trends that might inform shared stewardship priorities.

*Note:  HathiTrust provides a nice visualizations and a list of subject areas in the Digital Library, based on Library of Congress classification numbers.  These provide a good overview of subject-based coverage but without reference to comparable coverage in other libraries. It is generally known that Google is selective with respect to identifying library partners, but I’m not aware of any public documentation related to a specific collection development strategy. Their aim, famously, is to provide comprehensive coverage of the world’s books, not to develop excellence in any given subject area.

We are excited to be working with the Ohio State University (OSU) and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) on a new project to explore the contours of a regional strategy for managing the print book resource in the CHI-PITTS mega-region. Regular readers of this blog will know that mega-regions are geographic areas that typically encompass multiple population centers, exhibit a high degree of economic integration, and are bound together by a rich network of transportation, logistics, and communications infrastructure, as well as mutual cultural interests and similarities. Mega-regions are an intriguing concept for thinking about collaborative activities that scale above small groups of institutions, or even existing library consortia. OCLC Research recently published a report that used a mega-regions framework to explore the characteristics and implications of a North American network of regionally consolidated print book collections.

Over the last few months, we have explored this issue further by working with several US regional library consortia to examine their collective print book holdings in the context of the print book resource and infrastructure available in the mega-region most closely aligned with the location of the consortial membership. We have produced profiles for the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) in the context of the SO-CAL mega-region; the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) and the Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC) in the context of the CHAR-LANTA mega-region; and the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) membership in the context of the BOS-WASH mega-region. We plan to publish a series of case studies highlighting the findings from these consortial profiles in the near future.

Our new collaboration with OSU and the CIC is an extension of this consortial profiling work. In this project, we will examine print book holdings at multiple levels: an institution (OSU); a library consortium (CIC); and a mega-region (CHI-PITTS). The purpose of the work is to conduct a detailed analysis of the factors that an individual library might bring to bear in selecting books to contribute to a shared consortial collection, as well as to compare both the individual library collection and the consortial print book resource to the broader context of the print book resource available in the surrounding mega-region. The CHI-PITTS mega-region, which extends across the upper Midwest from Chicago to Pittsburgh, is the mega-region which aligns most closely with the locations of the CIC membership.

Some of the questions we will address include:

• What part of the OSU print book collection represents a distinctive asset when compared to the aggregate print book holdings within the CIC membership, or the broader CHI-PITTS mega-regional print book resource? What are the characteristics of these distinctive resources with respect to subject, age, and system-wide work-level holdings?
• What part of the OSU collection is widely held across the collections of the CIC membership, or institutions within the CHI-PITTS region? Can a “core” set of titles be identified, at the consortial or regional level, that represent duplicative investment? Are there opportunities to reduce local costs by managing these titles as a shared resource at the consortial or regional level?
• What does the ILL demand profile for OSU tell us about consortial and regional demand for its print book collection? How much of this demand is centered around OSU’s distinctive print book titles? How can OSU cooperate with other CIC members to meet local, consortial, and regional demand for print books?

Carol Pitts Diedrichs, Director of OSU Libraries, has posted a nice summary of the thinking that led up to this joint effort.

OSU volunteered to serve as a test case for this project, with the understanding that findings from the analysis will be useful to all CIC member libraries considering shared print archiving arrangements. Of course, we hope the project will be useful to other libraries as well. There is growing interest in how (or if) the lessons learned in journal archiving projects like the Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST) or the CIC Shared Print Repository can be applied to cooperative efforts to preserve monographic collections. This project should provide some answers. We expect to post periodic updates on the project over the next several months here on Hanging Together, and will publish a synthesis of findings in a final report later this year.

Lorcan Dempsey (VP of Research at OCLC) has long said that we need to “make our data work harder.” And for years that is exactly what OCLC Research has been doing. So when I was asked to speak on data mining at the OCLC European, Middle East, and African Regional Council Meeting in Strasbourg, France, I knew I would have a lot to talk about. Too much, in fact.

Instead of trying to cover everything we’ve been doing in a whirlwind of slides that no one would remember, I decided to use WorldCat Identities as a “poster child” for the kinds of data mining activities we have been doing recently here at OCLC Research. Then, I described another, related project — the Virtual International Authority File. To bring it all home I mentioned how we’re considering how we might be able to marry these two resources into one “super” identities service.

Consider what it would mean to take an aggregation of library-curated authority records and enhance it with algorithmically-derived data from WorldCat as well as links to other resources about creators such as Wikipedia. This would provide a rich resource of information about creators, all sitting behind authoritative and maintained identifiers that could be used in emerging new bibliographic structures such as is being created by the Library of Congress’ Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative. The mind reels with the possibilities.

But before I could jump into all this I needed a way to quickly explain why we are doing things like this — and how we are doing them. I decided I needed to make a video. So last week that is exactly what I did, with help from colleagues in Dublin. The result was less than three-and-a-half minutes long, and yet it amply set the stage for what was to come after. Plus, it can have a life of its own.

Take a look yourself, at “Cataloging Unchained”, and let me know what you think in the comments.

This research note was co-authored by Brian Lavoie  and Constance Malpas.

Opportunity cost seems to be the watchword for print book collections these days. The staff, physical space, and other resources consumed by print-centric collections and services are badly needed to support new priorities in library services, such as deeper user engagement and closer alignment with changing research and learning practices. In the face of evidence of declining print book usage, combined with an ever-expanding array of digital alternatives, it is not difficult to imagine a future where “bookless” libraries are the norm.

But this may be premature. Few libraries are prepared to pack up their print books and send them to off-site high-density storage. On several highly-publicized occasions, plans to reduce local print book inventory have met vigorous opposition – witness the recent firestorm at the New York Public Library. In short, print collections pose a dilemma for libraries: they are assets too valuable to dispose of, yet sinking in priority vis-à-vis other aspects of the library service portfolio. The phrase “managing down print”, increasingly common in print management discussions, neatly captures the dueling imperatives: the need to allocate resources away from managing print book collections, but to do so in a gradual, orderly way. So the search is on for the golden mean: a viable print management strategy that can at once leverage more value out of the legacy print investment, and lower maintenance costs. This question is far from settled, but the contours of the solution are becoming apparent. First, future print management strategies are likely to be collaborative, with print books increasingly viewed as a shared asset to be managed cooperatively. Second, the scale of cooperation receiving the most attention, in terms of both planned and implemented solutions, is at the regional level.

This is not to suggest that the rest is a mere matter of detail: for example, the policy and technical infrastructures needed to support a regional strategy for cooperative print management are still in early stages of development. In the meantime, we can speculate on what a network of cooperatively-managed regional print book collections might look like. The OCLC Research report Print Management at “Mega-scale”: A Regional Perspective on Print Book Collections in North America explores a new geography of print book collections based on the concept of mega-regions. Mega-regions are geographical areas defined on the basis of economic integration and other forms of interdependence. The mega-regions framework has the benefit of basing regional boundaries on a substantive underpinning of shared traditions, mutual interests, and the needs of a common constituency.

In the report, we combine WorldCat data with an operationalization of the mega-region concept by urbanist Richard Florida to produce a network of twelve mega-regional print book collections – i.e., the collective print book holdings of all libraries in each region – corresponding to the twelve North American mega-regions identified by Florida (see figure below; click on image to view full size). We explore the salient characteristics of the mega-regional collections individually and as a group, and synthesize these characteristics into a set of stylized facts. The stylized facts are then used to explore the implications of a regionally-based, cooperative print strategy across a wide spectrum of issues, including access, management, and preservation.

(Click on image to view full-size version.)

Viewing print book collections as a cooperatively-managed regional resource yields benefits on both the supply-side and the demand side. On the demand side, aggregating the print holdings of many institutions into a single collective collection creates a resource of greater scope and depth than any single local collection. Exposing this collective collection to users around the region – or even beyond – may amplify or even create demand for print books that experience little or no local use. On the supply-side, regional coordination could streamline print management and reduce costs. Opportunities emerge for collaboration and coordination in collecting and retention decisions – for example, by diminishing excessive duplication and sharing collecting priorities across many institutions.

While our application of the mega-regions framework to print management is speculative, evidence does suggest that the organization of library stewardship is being reconfigured on a new supra-institutional, regional basis. The Western Regional Storage Trust, a cooperative effort to archive print journals in libraries in many Western (and even Midwestern) US libraries, is one among many examples.  Some of these initiatives, like the CIC Shared Print Archive or the ASERL Print Journal Archive, have the potential – if not the explicit intent – to deliver benefit at mega-regional scale:  CIC member libraries are distributed across the expansive CHI-PITTS  region and ASERL’s membership is concentrated in CHAR-LANTA.  It will be interesting to see if these natural experiments in redistributing print preservation responsibilities across broad geographies result in a richer collective resource, undergirded by a robust federation of preservation commitments, or a differently fragmented set of regional collections.

In the coming year, we’ll have an opportunity to extend our mega-regions analysis by taking a demand-side view of the North American print book collection. We’ll be working with partner libraries in the CIC (notably the Ohio State University) to examine how inter-lending data might be combined with supply-side holdings data to inform a regional print management strategy for retrospective monographic collections in CHI-PITTS. Here’s a thumbnail sketch of the regional resource, excerpted from our project proposal:

In aggregate, the print book resource held in CHI-PITTS libraries amounts to more than 40% of print book titles in North America. About 16% of these titles are unique to the region, i.e. not duplicated in any of the other eleven mega region collections. The remainder constitutes a significant preservation “backstop” for other North American libraries: 50-92% of titles held by other individual mega-regions are duplicated in CHI-PITTS libraries. Thus, investments in the preservation of print books in the CHI-PITTS region can deliver significant benefit to libraries throughout North America. Conversely, there are relatively few regional collections that duplicate a significant share of the CHI-PITTS collection, which means that the burden of print preservation responsibilities (and investments) will be largely shouldered by institutions within the region. Since less than a fifth of the print books in the region are held by academic research libraries – traditionally viewed as the institutions with the greatest stake in print preservation – it seems apparent that networks like the CIC will have an important role to play in rationalizing regional print preservation priorities and investment.

The CIC is an interesting test case for this sort of project, since all libraries in the consortium are partners in the HathiTrust Digital Library, a shared digital repository. By our reckoning, a third or more of the titles held by CIC member libraries are already “backed up” by digital preservation copies in HathiTrust.  Yet from a regional perspective, the situation is strikingly different:  we estimate that less than a fifth of the print books in CHI-PITTS are duplicated by HathiTrust. The collective preservation burden therefore remains significant even in a region with comparatively robust cooperative library infrastructure.

In regions where shared library infrastructure is less developed or less integrated, the challenges may be even greater.  Take Southern California, for example.  We estimate that the regional print book resource in the SO-CAL mega-region amounts to just under 10 million titles with about 40 million library holdings (i.e. holdings set by libraries in the region).  While much smaller in size than the CHI-PITTS collection, the SO-CAL collection represents an important regional asset and a significant stewardship concern for academic libraries in the area.  As elsewhere, these libraries are individually and collectively reassessing the opportunity costs of managing local print inventory and considering “above the institution” solutions.  Not surprisingly, smaller academic libraries look to larger research-intensive institutions as partners in the preservation enterprise and potential providers of shared infrastructure.

The University of California system, with five large research libraries and a high-density storage facility in the SO-CAL region, is an obvious focus of attention. But the infrastructure developed to support a statewide research university system with a global brand cannot simply be extended to serve all other libraries in the region. There is no shared governance model for the regional library resource, which is distributed across hundreds of public and private institutions. And there is no business model currently in place that would enable libraries to opt in to “preservation by proxy” arrangements. Yet, progress is being made. A group of library leaders from academic libraries and consortia in and around Southern California will meet later this week to begin what is certain to be a long conversation about a regional print management strategy. Bob Kieft, a long-time supporter (and sometime agitator) for collaborative collection management, has organized the meeting, which will be hosted by UCLA. It’s impossible to predict what the outcomes of the discussion might be – there is certainly no recipe for success in regional print management – but it is unquestionably an important first step in addressing what is increasingly a “mega” problem.

I was fortunate to attend the final session of the recent Association of Research Libraries membership meeting on this topic. The panel of presentations served as the occasion for the release of a new briefing paper for research library directors, “21st-Century Collections: Calibration of Investment and Collaborative Action.”

The paper is the work of the ARL 21st-Century Research Library Collections Task Force, co-chaired by Deborah Jakubs at Duke University, and Tom Leonard at the University of California Berkeley. It’s worth your attention. The paper (pdf) focuses on the collaborative future of collections and looks at the future contours from the perspective of scholars/researchers, content, publishing and infrastructure. It’s very short and intended to be evocative and provocative as opposed to providing a blueprint or schematic on how to assemble the future it outlines. This caused some discussion during the meeting – should ARL be distilling the sense of the community and presenting it back or should it be an organization that organizes its members around an action plan to assemble the future? Given the diversity of the membership and the varying aspirations and resources of the institutions it’s hard to imagine that grand plan execution should be an ARL aspiration. That seemed to be the sense of those still assembled.

The closest to an action schematic in the discussion was the presentation by Wendy Pradt Lougee at the University of Minnesota, who said content is still a core role but the context for investments is changing as are the strategies which will require coordination and collaboration on a new scale. Her presentation titled Content & Collections:Rubrics and Rubiks is a must-read.

Her new rubric presents what I think is the correct formulation of the change that’s imperative and it highlights the inherent problem in arriving at that new equilibrium state. Essentially that state requires us to solve an equation whose left side is the newly optimized local circumstance (priorities, infrastructure, uniqueness) and whose right side is a set of shared supra-institutional factors (goals, priorities, infrastructure and services). The problem with the equation is that it has no constants. For local optimization to occur it needs to be aware of and rely on the supra-institutional factors – those are not yet in place and their characteristics not yet codified in a way that allows local choices to be made and operational processes to be confidently altered..

It seems to me that the challenge to supra-institutional providers of infrastructure and services is to define some of that future infrastructure and service provision in concert with the collective goals and priorities of those they intend to serve. Once defined those providers need to declare their intention to build, offer and sustain those services so that local institutional decisions can be definitively made. In the US there are quite a few actual and aspiring providers of shared infrastructure and services. OCLC is certainly one of the largest and is a pervasive provider along some important dimensions of the library service portfolio. Our challenge is to listen to the emerging desires of our members for a different class of shared services and then exercise leadership that commits to the provision of that infrastructure and those services where we have a unique capacity. This is the kind of change that would provide our members with the constants that let them optimally solve the local equation.

For the past year and a half, Dennis and I have been working closely with a group of Research Library Partners and others to develop and test a method for registering print archives in WorldCat.  I’m pleased to say that the OCLC Print Archives Disclosure Pilot is now complete and a final report of our findings has been published. The report was jointly authored by Lizanne Payne (project director of the Western Regional Storage Trust), Emily Stambaugh (manager of  the California Digital Library’s Shared Print program), along with Dennis and myself.  Partners in this project included the Center for Research Libraries, (CRL), the California Digital Library (CDL), and the libraries of Indiana University; Stanford University; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, San Diego; the University of Minnesota and the University of Oregon.

The report has actually been out for a few weeks now; it was published without fuss or fanfare at the end of April. Gary Price was kind enough to feature it in an InfoDocket post last month, and it’s been making the rounds on some of the specialized discussion lists devoted to print archiving and preservation activities.  The specifics of the report — guidance on how and where to register print preservation commitments — apply to a relatively small number of institutions, but the publication itself marks a milestone for library community as a whole.  It represents the culmination of several related efforts directed at redesigning the critical (and costly) business of  preserving print books and journals.

It’s been a long road.  Back in 2009, an OCLC Research working group undertook a review of shared print policy documents that revealed some significant gaps in existing guidance, particularly with respect to how and where print archiving commitments should be expressed or registered:

About half of the policies [examined in the report] stipulate that the special retention and/or shared access status of documents covered by the agreement should be systematically registered; less than 20% specify a location in the MARC21 bibliographic or local holdings record where this information is to be recorded. Only a quarter of the policies reviewed mandate disclosure of the retention or shared access status in regional, national or international union lists.

This last finding has important implications for collection-sharing efforts that seek to achieve significant scale or impact on system-wide economies. More effective and systematic disclosure of retention commitments, in particular, might produce significant network effects by enabling anonymous participation in collection-sharing initiatives, generating secondary benefits for the entire library community.

Predictably, the report closed with a set of recommendations (or admonitions) intended to address the policy gaps that we felt were most important:

Cooperative agreements that are intended to achieve or to enable truly transformative change in the way library print collections are managed should include:

• A business model that acknowledges the changing value of library print resources in the current information environment;
• An explicit acknowledgment that effective disclosure of library holdings and retention commitments is necessary to support distributed management of print archives; and
• A commitment to capture, retain and share item-level condition information so that the preservation quality of print archives may be better judged.

The working group that contributed to the policy review was disbanded in 2009, but several participants continued to work, more or less informally, on drafting a set of guidelines for print archives disclosure in WorldCat.  That effort was explicitly modeled on modeled on practices developed in the 1990s for recording preservation microfilming information.  At the time, NEH was funding a large-scale brittle books preservation program and, to reduce duplicative effort, participating libraries needed a mechanism for identifying the titles and volumes that were already queued for filming.  Nancy Elkington was a prime mover in developing standard practices for recording this information in bibliographic union catalogs, using the MARC 583 Preservation Action Note.

Along with Deb McKern, a preservation officer at the Library of Congress, Nancy encouraged us to extend use of the 583 Action Note to print archiving activities.  Since 2005, use of the 583 had already been extended to registration of digital archives in the Registry of Digital Masters, a joint effort of the Digital Library Federation and OCLC.  It seemed sensible to build upon this past work in developing guidelines for registering print archiving commitments.  However, our initial effort to define guidelines for print archives disclosure foundered when it became clear that the bibliographic record was not an appropriate vehicle for recording item-level condition or retention statements.  For journal archiving efforts in particular, it was difficult to convey in a title-level record how much of a given journal run was actually preserved.  And, in a master-record union catalog like WorldCat, it was even harder to see how archiving commitments from multiple institutions could be adequately represented.

For a year or more, our efforts to define descriptive metadata guidelines for print archiving lay fallow.  Other projects were taken up.  But by 2010, with the emergence of several large-scale print journal archiving efforts and increasing public awareness of the importance of distributed preservation, it was clear that common approach to identifying shared print collections was urgently needed.  As anticipated in our 2009 report, the largest archiving efforts were finding it impossible to “scale up” without some shared infrastructure.  Happily, in the intervening years, support for item-level holdings information in WorldCat had increased substantially and it was possible to design and test a disclosure strategy that was better adapted to journals.  With the support of OCLC product management, the Print Archives Disclosure Pilot project was launched.  And as a result we are now — collectively — in a better place to design and implement scalable strategies for print preservation.

At the last Association of Research Libraries (ARL) membership meeting (which means I’ve been carrying this thought around since mid-October, shame on me) I sat in on the Transforming Research Libraries Committee meeting chaired by my long-time friend, Carton Rogers. He precipitated what turned out to be a very engaged and frank discussion about the staffing challenges research libraries face while trying to navigate the increasingly urgent imperatives to transform their operations and renovate their portfolio of services.

He got things started by sharing an excerpt from an survey of ARL directors that asked what were the top three areas ARL should emphasize on behalf of members over the next three years. The first choice of 41.7% of the respondents was

Workforce needs of 21st century research libraries, including new roles for professionals.

A few of the committee members spoke to that issue and by the end of the discussion nearly every one in the room had shared their local challenges in this regard. People talked about inter-generational work issues, succession problems, and the obstacles to change posed by both union circumstances and librarians with faculty status. They wanted to have librarians engaged more directly in the research process and the outputs of their institutions but recognized that most of the current work force was not sufficiently versed in the research process or in the deliverables from that process to become effective support or service agents. All of these are real world management challenges that even with the best of will on the part of both management and staff seemed increasingly intractable.

In a follow-on conversation to the meeting I was reminded of a very good piece of research done by a group of ARL Research Library Leadership Fellows a few years ago that spoke directly to this problem. Krisellen Maloney, Kristin Antelman, Kenning Arlitsch and John Butler did a project whose results were first presented at the October 2008 ARL Membership meeting in a session titled “What are our future leaders thinking?” They later published the work in CR&L in a piece titled “Future Leaders’ Views on Organizational Culture“.

Their project surveyed 165 future leaders (see the article for their working definition) to assess whether there was a relationship between future library leaders’ satisfaction with their organizational cultures and their perception of their own effectiveness. As you might imagine the academic library profile is dominated by a Hierarchy culture and the preferred culture,as perceived by this population, is more flexible and externally oriented. The staff who are most likely to contribute to the reshaping and transforming of the academic library service portfolio feel thwarted and judge their efforts ineffective. The discussion and conclusions in the published article are worth your attention.

What library administrators identify as a staffing challenge is cast, in the most measured way, by the authors as a call for organizational cultural change. Moving from hierarchy to adhocracy – a culture of high flexibility and external focus – would liberate the motivated staff resources we already have and create an environment congenial to the people with the skill sets that the future library needs. Without minimizing the individual local management challenge it seems to me that we would do well to put in place an explicit program aimed at cultural change at the same time that we look to renew, realign and refresh library staff skill sets.

P.S. It was at their ARL presentation that I was first introduced to Prezi, the presentation software that is the anti-powerpoint, which has become my default environment for my presentations.

In March, Jim and I attended a workshop on using the ARL 2030 Scenarios (I know, it was a while ago, but its been a busy year). If you have not had a chance to look at the scenarios, I urge to to at least give them a skim. I was intrigued by the idea of scenario planning, reading through the materials on the ARL website and watching a webinar on scenario planning made me even more interested in how one would use the scenarios to do strategic planning.

The workshop was focused on using the materials in the user’s guide to start a strategic conversation as part of a long range planning process. At the beginning of the workshop, attendees talked about how they hoped they would use the scenarios. Several attendees talked about the need to develop new services, while others wanted to use the scenarios in developing a strategic framework for their organization (either from scratch or renewing an aged strategy). Still others talked about using the scenarios to approach workforce transformation within an organization, or how to utilize a new space. As the workshop progressed, we tested how to use the scenarios for a variety of purposes, and they seemed to work beautifully — ARL has pulled together a terrific set of materials that would make it easy for an institution to apply the materials in an institutional setting — “just add water and a few facilitators.”

We are interested in hearing from institutions that have used the scenarios, and what their findings have been. We are even more interested in bringing groups of institutions together around a shared concern or uncertainty and the ARL scenarios are one tool we may be able to use to find shared solutions or to identify areas where we can see we will need to move collectively. Are you willing to share your findings with us? Are you interested in doing group planning with other members of the OCLC Research Library Partnership? Get in touch!

Many thanks to Susan Stickley, who did a terrific job facilitating the workshop and to the ARL staff who have worked on the scenarios and supported the workshop.

To close the FutureCast conference I provided a summary and a synthesis of the two and one-half days we’d been together. Given the series of posts that Merrilee provided you’ve already gotten a very nice summary of the sessions so here I’ll just offer up a brief version of my synthesis.

Our hope for the conference was that we’d create some shared context and arrive at the elements of a shared agenda. We certainly established a shared context and while I can’t say we arrived at a shared agenda we did divine some important places to focus attention.

To synthesize I parsed the various discussions and records of breakout groups into categories that I thought were associated with values of one kind or another. It was these shared values and needs that seemed to me to provide the foundation on which we could build an action agenda. The values and needs sorted into these categories:

Service values – Here I put services that research libraries should be offering and that are likely to be more highly valued by our constituents. There was general consensus on these during the meeting and in many cases we were able to explore how these services would be different than what we’re doing now.

Rising/emerging values- These were needs that participants agreed were on the ascendancy and likely to create a new value proposition for the library but not part of the prior generally accepted set of service needs.

Established/traditional values – These were professional and domain values that kept asserting themselves in discussions representing activities and processes that are currently embedded in the library. They are things we think we have to do.

Some common culture and boundary conditions frame these values and needs and they shape the nature, type and effectiveness of our services, at present and in future. These conditions need to be explicitly acknowledged in discussions. Here’s the picture I used to talk about these values and conditions.

Among the service values we heard things where there was consensus that we should be doing them but they were not yet getting attention. In general these might be new to our value proposition. For instance:

• Collection Development becomes Collection Services.
• Resource management is configured like a fulfillment agency – this is a necessary infrastructure that lets the library concentrate on and offer other services which in turn joins up with a move to
• Purchase/Supply on demand which is made more effective through
• Interinstitutional sharing of services e.g. area studies. Research libraries seem ready, willing and wanting to rely on one another’s scarce services – including scarce or expensive systems. If we reconfigure in this way it lets us get into the business of
• Providing rich context for information (beyond title metadata) – libraries could be a locus for adding rich context to information objects. This is a value that would be appreciated and noticed. However if we’re going to invest in something like this it demands
• Staff reconfiguration which is required by many of the things we want to be doing for the future; all of which lead to libraries
• Expanding boundaries, unbundling and connecting horizontally across the university

The above are examples of an emerging shared expectation of a new configuration of valued services.

Among the rising/emerging values there was some consensus but they are not defined enough yet to be a shared expectation. For instance:

• Student experience – a renewed attention to the ways the libraries contribute to the student experience
• Researcher support – provide a different bundle of services in their support, stepping back from something else in order to do this
• Mix and Re-use – we need to make our collections and items ready for this kind of use
• Impact amplification – we could play a much bigger and successful role in amplifying the outputs of our local institution
• Courseware creation – participate in this in a different kind of direct way
• [Social & crowd-sourcing] – bracketed because we don’t talk about them in a sufficiently precise way to act on them. There is an urge to do these things but not many good examples and a lot of uncertainty that we know the right scale at which they should be done.
• [Open Access & open access] – there is a distinction between the two – the latter is about interoperability so stuff can play nicely while the former is about changing the business models of scholarly outputs – but neither of them may be very effectively shaped by our actions.

Our shared view of a future set of services is often derailed by our established and traditional values. We can’t do the new things because we need to do such things as:

• Collect the Scholarly Record
• Preserve what is being produced
• Support Global Studies that is, collect for those who don’t collect for themselves.
• and…

There is a huge tension when we pull forward these established values and needs and impose them on a future service set that has different contours. We need to have an explicit conversation about this. In the future these activities will not be everybody’s job. We need to know who is taking these on. As a small part of our community continues to discharge these traditional services there must be a broad community conversation that sets expectations for the future, that permits a part of the community to rely on the others, that allows the others to sustain these traditional activities and allows everyone to feel confident that these responsibilities will get discharged in a well understood system-wide way.

It’s not only our traditional and established values that stymy change. We struggle against circumstances that are in large part general cultural and boundary conditions. Among those are:

• Local management systems – so for instance our urges around rich data are bounded by local systems and what they can support making them gating when it comes to change.
• Work processes – traditional work processes built around format silos and tailored to another operational era persist and keep us from moving on to do the new and the valued.
• Mission alignment & confusion – we try to align our activities but it is difficult to establish direct impact and often difficult to reconcile university rhetoric with what is actually done.
• Peer review and tenure – our ability to provide rich context for information is bounded by the traditional academic drivers of reward and promotion. We can understand this but we can’t change it.

All of this suggests that within the OCLC Research Library Partnership there should be a focus on new and emerging distinctive services that define and instantiate some of the new service values that were discussed or that shape some of the rising and emerging service values. OCLC Research in the context of the Partnership can provide:

• Models – can distinctive services be abstracted from early successes and generalized so that others can provide something similar? do they look the same from place to place?
• Infrastructure – where some of these services might require new bits of infrastructure to be as good as imagined
• Prototypes – where they are needed to define the service and ensure general community understanding
• Socialization – of the expectations that our institutions should have of the future library.

The reinvention of research libraries will challenge familiar expectations about both services and space. We will unbundle the library into a set of services that is separable from the space and more directly joined to the distinctive aspirations of the institution that supports the library.