2013 Charleston Conference

All of a sudden, libraries seem have too much print in their stacks, much of it unused, if statistics are to be believed. The usual solution is judicious de-accessioning, aka weeding, based on various factors such as circulation, age, duplication across formats, and collection policies. This may be fine for individual libraries, but what if you’re part of group of libraries, interdependent and connected by a shared discovery catalog and delivery service? What if no one kept enough copies of stuff to supply users with needed books and journals in the future? And aren’t we all really parts of a larger library group?

Learn how nine institutions in Maine – including public, university, and college libraries, the state library, and the statewide collaborative system – are deciding what to keep, rather than what to discard. At last year’s Charleston Conference, the Maine Shared Collections Strategy grant, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, presented as part of the Shared Print Archiving: Making It Work preconference. We’ve made great progress since then.

Deb Rollins (Collection Services, University of Maine) and Becky Albitz (Collection Management, Bates College) will discuss the review and analysis of collections data for a collective three million monographs, OCLC shared print symbols and retention disclosure from local to national levels, HathiTrust and Internet Archive digital copies and their effect on decisions, implications of a multi-type library group on what we’re keeping, policy issues, and more.

We hope participants will come to the session with questions and observations and ideas, and will leave with some understanding of the factors involved in managing legacy print in a collective collection.