Library information provider OCLC Research, US, has released a new report titled, 'Cloud-sourcing Research Collections: Managing Print in the Mass-digitized Library Environment'. This report presents findings from a year-long study designed and executed by OCLC Research, the HathiTrust, New York University's Elmer Bobst Library, and the Research Collections Access & Preservation (ReCAP) consortium, with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The objective of the project was to examine the feasibility of outsourcing management of low-use print books held in academic libraries to shared service providers, including large-scale print and digital repositories. The study assessed the opportunity for library space saving and cost avoidance through the systematic and intentional outsourcing of local management operations for digitised books to shared service providers and progressive downsizing of local print collections in favour of negotiated access to the digitised corpus and regionally consolidated print inventory.
According to the report, there is sufficient material in the mass-digitised library collection managed by the HathiTrust to duplicate a sizeable (and growing) portion of virtually any academic library in the US. There is adequate duplication between the shared digital repository and large-scale print storage facilities to enable a great number of academic libraries to reconsider their local print management operations, says the report. Further, it states that the combination of a relatively small number of potential shared print providers, including the US Library of Congress, was sufficient to achieve more than 70 percent coverage of the digitised book collection, suggesting that shared service may not require a very large network of providers.
Substantial library space savings and cost avoidance could be achieved if academic institutions outsourced management of redundant low-use inventory to shared service providers, the report noted. Academic library directors can have a positive and profound impact on the future of academic print collections by adopting and implementing a deliberate strategy to build and sustain regional print service centers that can reduce the total cost of library preservation and access, the report says.
The report is available online at
http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2011/2011-01.pdf.
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