The Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST), a partnership to create a distributed retrospective print journal repository in western US, has announced that it has completed its first round of print journal archiving. This has been accomplished under a three-year programme jointly funded by WEST members and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In the first cycle in the 2011-12 academic year, 12 WEST libraries serving as archive holders on behalf of the partnership, archived more than 6,100 journal titles, comprising over 160,000 volumes. These totals include almost 5,100 titles archived at the Bronze level, more than 500 titles archived at the Silver level and more than 500 titles validated at the Gold level.
The WEST validation levels are designed to ensure that library collections are preserved and made available for long-term use by future generations of students and scholars, while investing in archiving efforts appropriate to the level of risk. The archiving commitments have been recorded in the OCLC WorldCat database and the Center for Research Libraries Print Archives Preservation Registry using Print Archives Metadata Guidelines developed in conjunction with an OCLC pilot project last year. The aim is to make the information available in a standardised form to libraries across the US.
Building on these archiving commitments, WEST has produced individualised collection comparison reports for most of its members — an important benefit of WEST membership. To aid in making collection management decisions, each member library that provided information about its print journal holdings has received a report listing the titles in its collection that have been archived by another WEST partner library.
Eight new members joined the initiative in 2012: California State University–Northridge; New Mexico State University; and, through the consortial membership of the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC), California Baptist University, La Sierra University, Santa Clara University, University of Redlands, University of San Diego and Whittier College. This brings the total WEST membership to 109 libraries in 18 states, many through consortial partners Orbis Cascade Alliance and SCELC.
