Maine Shared Collections Strategy Collection Development Committee

August 29, 2013

Colby College, Miller Library, Conference Room

1:00 – 4:00 PM

Attendees: Clem Guthro, Becky Albitz, Christy Coombs, Deb Rollins, Matthew Revitt, Joan Campbell, Peggy O’Kane, Lanny Lumbert, Toni Katz, Sarah Campbell, Sara Amato (called in), Rick Lugg, Andy Breeding

Known absentees: Brian Damien, Barbara McDade

1.    Project Updates

a.    Disclosing retention commitments – local catalogs, OCLC & MaineCat

Sara updated the Collection Development Committee on her work adding MSCS retention commitments in the 583 field in local catalogs. At the time of the meeting approximately 786,000 Committed To Retain (CTR) statements had been disclosed across all eight MSCS libraries.

Sara will continue to identify and resolve oddities with the data and hopes to have this work completed for ALL MSCS libraries by early next week.

Note: see here for up-to-date totals of commitments disclosed.

Matthew and Sara presented examples of the public display of the CTR statement in Bates’ and Bowdoin’s (only a test) local catalogs. Joan commented that some staff at Bowdoin were concerned about both the prominence of the message and that it could confuse patrons into thinking the item is not on the shelf. Some Bowdoin staff also felt that disclosing the statement should be delayed until the new shared Colby, Bates and Bowdoin (CBB) catalog is up and working (possibly in February).

The Collection Development Committee agreed that as long the statement is displayed (using the consistent wording of ‘MSCC Retention Copy’) it will be a local CBB decision how it is displayed both in their current individual catalogs and long-term in the shared catalog.

b.    Journals & Serials Collections Analysis – update on Sara comparison work

Sara has been using MSCS series data (submitted to the HathiTrust for their price quote) to compare MSCS holdings with the following publishers and aggregators: PORTICO, JSTOR, specific ProQuest titles and American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals 1-5. Sara has created a database with different search parameters to allow MSCS to analyze the series data. Sara commented that there may be local specific issues with the data because of the way in which location is recorded. Matthew and Deb will test the database to identify any issues before sharing access with the Committee who should also flag any anomalies. Sara emphasized that comparisons are at the title NOT holding level.

c.    E-book-On-Demand & Print-On-Demand investigations

Sara and Matthew presented a test HathiTrust Public Domain MaineCat record with links to both the HathiTrust and Google Books. Matthew showed how the “Read Online from HathiTrust” link takes a user to the HathiTrust online library where they can read a copy of the item and download a PDF copy (page by page for non-HathiTrust member patrons and full download for HathiTrust member patrons). Matthew also showed how the “Download from Google Books” link will take a user to the Google Books online library where they download a full copy of the item. The Google Books link will only be in the record of Google digitized Public Domain items.

Matthew reported that he hoped the MSCS Directors would decide at tomorrow’s Director’s Council meeting which of the libraries still wanted to join the HathiTrust.

The Project Team have agreed that MSCS would test a POD service and that ILL POD requests would be routed to UMaine, who would use the UMaine Printing Services to print a copy of a book and send it to the requester. Grant funds will be used to pay for testing the service and usage will be monitored. Sara reported that she would be meeting with James, Matthew, and Greg Curtis (UMaine) on Tuesday September 3rd to discuss the workflow for delivering Print-On-Demand (POD) requests.

Sara confirmed for Toni that links to HathiTrust and Google Books will only appear in MaineCat. In terms of local catalogs, libraries that have a discovery layer as their main search interface (e.g. Summon), can have the HathiTrust Public Domain titles turned on to be searchable.

All HathiTrust Public Domain titles will be loaded into SOLAR to display in MaineCat. Sara reported that she is currently waiting to see how much massaging needs to be done to the HathiTrust records before they are loaded into SOLAR, but her goal is to have the loading completed by the beginning of October.

2.    Retention Scenario One

a.    Special collections & circulating copy commitments – confirm decision to CTR all circulating copies in Scenario One that match any retained Special Collections copies (regardless of whether the circ copies had any circulation) & discuss with SCS lists for adding 583’s

The Committee confirmed their decision (made in an email conversation) to Commit To Retain (CTR) ALL circulating copies in Scenario One that match any retained Special Collections copies (regardless of whether the circulating copies had any circulation). Bangor Public also wants to keep a circulating copy even if it had zero circulations and held by 10+ in OCLC.

Matthew asked Andy to provide MSCS with lists of items that fall into this category (but would have previously been in the Needs Further Examination category), so that 583 retention commitments can be assigned to them.

b.    Multi-volume sets – agree on MSCS retention policy

Matthew presented the CTR totals of multi-volume set items for each library, which were looked at the July 30th meeting. Following this meeting Matthew had circulated lists of these items for review and asked whether as a group with the chance to conduct more detailed analysis than was done for single-item bibs MSCS were willing to CTR multi-volume sets using the Retention Scenario One criteria. Matthew reported that he had heard back from Deb and Becky who were both AGAINST committing to retain multi-volume sets and Joan who was FOR committing to retain Bowdoin’s multi-volume sets. Matthew asked the Committee what it wanted to decide as a group for the retention policy of multi-volume sets in Retention Scenario One.

Joan responded that her decision was based on a first glance and because some folks at Bowdoin had been concerned about leaving it to the conscientious weeding model, then the last institution to weed would feel compelled to keep the item. Particularly as traditionally Bowdoin have been slower in weeding, so they did not want a situation where the “last institution to weed” is left with it, as it doesn’t seem fair. But if MSCS designate a holder as part of this process now, then retention commitments can be more fairly distributed across the libraries (using SCS’s algorithm).

Deb’s email response to this was that although she saw Joan’s points but, “If maintaining at least one copy of everything we currently own collectively was the goal, we (MSCS) would have simply designated those batches of records from the outset – regardless of circulation, availability in Hathi, multiplicity of editions, level of OCLC holdings etc. There would be no decisions to make other than which titles/batches should have more than 1 copy retained, and how many, and what the distribution would be”. Joan thanked Deb for this response because it had helped to clarify the goals of the grant. Deb’s sampling of UMaine’s CTR multi-volume sets had also shown Joan that in fact although these editions might be rare in OCLC (only 0-9 holdings) in fact when one looks at other editions of the same title 69% of the volumes were in title-sets held by 50 or more OCLC libraries. Joan commented that the fact they were widely available was comforting and that she would be willing to go along with the group should it decide to not commit to retain these titles.

Becky commented that her response of not adding CTR’s for multi-volume did not mean that Bates intended to de-accession the titles, but that they just wouldn’t CTR.

Toni asked why MSCS would apply different rules to multi-volume sets than had been done for single-item bibs. Matthew responded that the main concern seemed to be the real estate multi-volume sets occupy and what that meant if libraries were committing to retain titles for 15 years.

Clem responded that one of the goals of the grant was to protect the intellectual collection of Maine and that will include many multi-volume sets and to not CTR would be inconsistent with what had been decided for single item bibs. Clem commented that he was less concerned with the retention of textbooks which is why he had produced a list of publishers which he thinks should come out of the CTR lists (see below). Clem felt that identifying what is actually is a multi-volume set may be difficult because of cataloguing discrepancies and variations.

Joan responded that if multi-volumes meet the Retention Scenario One criteria why doesn’t MSCS CTR and then have an appeals process for those libraries that don’t want to CTR.

Lanny commented that that some of USM’s CTR multi-volume sets were in the local protected category.

The Committee agreed to be consistent and apply the same criteria used for single-item bibs to multi-volume sets, but libraries can appeal the CTR’s using the reversal process (see below).

c.    Committed To Retain: MSCS Retention Scenario One Title-holdings Reversal Request Procedure – review draft & discuss review of CTR lists

Deb presented her work looking at UMaine’s CTR titles. Deb was considering a two pronged approach: keep CTR for higher circulation items, and keep CTR on the same-edition and any-edition data at certain cutoff points for the lower-circulation-in-Maine-but-still-valuable-nationally items.

After reviewing Deb’s work, the Committee decided to stick with the current criteria, but allow libraries to reverse commitments using the MSCS Retention Scenario One Title-holdings Reversal Request Procedure.

Matthew presented his draft set of procedures–he explained how the intention is for them to be used for scenario one titles ONLY. At the request of the Project Team, Matthew only included batch criteria–not elements like poor physical condition, which cannot be applied in batch. The deadline for requests is October 1st because the Project Team wanted the process to be completed in time for Sara to be able to add 583’s and also to update LHR’s in OCLC, so MSCS can be sure the commitments disclosed will last. Deb is working on reviewing UMaine’s lists and aims to have it done before the October 1st deadline for them to be used as a test case for the LHR process.

Matthew asked the Committee if they had any comments and/or suggested changes regarding the procedures.

Becky asked Matthew to add to the criteria items found to be missing or lost. Sara will run lists of items not found during her load, which are potentially lost, and provide them to libraries and then they can be run as a batch group.

Following feedback at the August 14th Project Team meeting, Matthew had added the criterion “Title-sets not actually rare in OCLC (<10), where numerous title-sets with separate printings or publishers have the same content” to remove multiple editions of the same work particularly sub-quality editions such as perma-bounds. Andy commented that in approximately 95% of cases the reason why a title was in the CTR category was because it had circulated NOT just because it was rare in OCLC. Clem felt that what counts as an edition is murky, particularly because it changes from the 19th to 20th century. Clem believed that the MSCC Collections and Operations Committee (to be formed) should look at edition specific issues after the grant period. Clem felt MSCS should protect 19th century edition differences, which can have important scholarly value, but he is less concerned with 20th century differences between editions in the age of mass print. Clem went on to state that FRBR was intended to be used by the public to identify, for example, the video of Pride & Prejudice vs. the book NOT for it to be used by libraries themselves.

Clem commented that he just wants MSCS to pull from the CTR lists things that the libraries would have weeded anyway (like outdated textbooks), which is why he produced his list of publishers that he thinks should come out of the CTR list. The intention is to compare the list of publishers with the CTR spreadsheet and filter and remove the publisher’s titles from the CTR list. Clem also commented that he thinks this refinement of the CTR list will make for good reporting to IMLS. A discussion then ensued regarding situations when libraries have received requests for outdated textbooks and reference material for example, travel guides at Portland Public. Matthew reminded the Committee that just because a title doesn’t have a CTR doesn’t mean the library has to dispose of it. The Committee also discussed examples of publishers they wanted added to the list. This list will be run against the entire MSCS CTR list and the items will be pulled out and the commitments removed from the local catalogs.

Matthew asked Rick and Andy whether this comparison work was something SCS could run for MSCS. Andy and Rick both felt that the ‘publisher’ field was a messy one for example, with different spellings and so would not be totally accurate. Rick also used this as an opportunity to point out that although SCS are still committed to working with MSCS that they need to consider the level of work they are being asked to complete and that MSCS should look at doing the publisher comparisons themselves. The Committee agreed that Sara will complete this work, not SCS and accepted that there will be some errors because of the messiness of the field, but accepted that nothing at this scale is 100% perfect. It may be that a combination of keywords and publishers is used to identify the material.

Matthew will send around aGoogle document for the Committee to add to Clem’s list of publishers. The Committee will be given two weeks to contribute to this list (September 12th).

Clem asked SCS whether they could remove from consideration in Scenario Two (see below) the work of publishers included in the Scenario One list. Andy agreed to look into the options available for supporting this request, taking into account the issues discussed above regarding work load and accuracy of data. Sara commented that she wants to weed the CTR list of items published by the publishers in the list that won’t receive first, before adding the 583 commitments locally.

In cases where libraries want to CTR material produced by these publishers, they will be free to make additional CTR’s. Sara will be sending to libraries guidance for how to do this.

The Committee discussed how the current set of procedures are intended to be used to batch reverse commitments and so potential criteria which cannot be done in batch such as replacing earlier editions and reversing CTR’s for copies in poor physical condition will be looked at post grant by the MSCC Collections and Operations Committee. Deb mentioned that she has already been following the MSCC MOU by purchasing replacement copies for damaged UMaine CTR titles.

In terms of the deadline, Deb commented that in her opinion the final retention disclosure is in OCLC, so if libraries don’t want to CTR titles they shouldn’t be included in the list Sara submits to OCLC for updating the Local Holding Records. Sarah responded that couldn’t this result in a mass weeding exercise to avoid being the library expected to CTR. The Committee agreed that libraries should only be able to reverse CTR’s if they meet the agreed batch criteria in the procedures.

d.    MSCS Technical Services Committee opposition to recording in a local note ‘Not selected for MSCC retention 2013’– decide whether to reverse decision

At the previous Collection Development Committee meeting on July 30th it was agreed that MSCS should record in a local note field that the title was ‘Not selected for MSCC retention 2013′. Sara brought this up with the MSCS Technical Committee at their August 5th meeting. The Technical Committee were unanimous in their opposition to adding the note.

The Project Team agreed at their August 14th meeting that they had no objections to reversing this decision as long as the Collection Development Committee approved it. Matthew commented that if he remembered correctly the feeling at the July 30th Collection Development Committee meeting had been that there was “no harm doing it”, but the Technical Services Committee felt there was definite “harm” in doing so.

Matthew asked the Committee whether they were willing to reverse their decision. Joan asked why they the Technical Services Committee were opposed. Matthew responded that they felt it would require a great deal of work for not much additional information. Joan asked whether it would not be Sara doing the work. Matthew confirmed it would be Sara who would add the note using global update. Matthew went on that the consensus was that a lack of a retention statement on older material already indicated that it had been considered and did not required retention. Joan commented that this would mean relying on institutional knowledge to remember what had been agreed.

The Collection Committee agreed that the note would not have any value and would only serve to add extra ‘clutter’ to the record. The Committee therefore agreed to reverse their July 30th decision and NOT record that a title was ‘Not selected for MSCC retention 2013′.

3.    Retention Scenario Two (Title held by 3 or more MSCS Libraries)

a.    Lessons learned from Retention Scenario One – how to avoid same issues

Before moving on to look at Retention Scenario Two (Title held by 3 or more MSCS Libraries) Matthew asked the Committee to review some lessons learned from Retention Scenario One, so MSCS can try and avoid making the same mistakes again when looking at Retention Scenario Two and needing another CTR reversal procedure.

Matthew felt that MSCS should have raised the circulation threshold hold higher because one circulation in the history of circulation data is not a lot! However, Clem and Joan disagreed they would not have changed the threshold. Clem felt that when making commitments at scale there is always going to be ‘junk’ that have CTR’s, so MSCS Directors are not going to support committing to retain a copy of everything, but by using the reversal process (see above) to remove the commitments on this ‘junk’ material he would be happy with making CTR’s on everything else.

Andy commented that for him, a lesson learned would be that it is not costly for SCS to run different sets of retention criteria and it is easier to change the criteria than to ask for CTR lists to be cut and re-cut. The Committee recognized that this had been an issue and that MSCS needs to spend longer ensuring the criteria is correct before requesting CTR lists.

Rick commented that perhaps MSCS should consider a shorter retention period possibly 5 years for this round of commitments because 15 years is a big commitment in terms of cost and lock in for libraries to make. Joan responded that libraries would not be willing to make withdrawals based on only five year retention commitments. Rick responded that perhaps MSCS should look more at a regional approach and that as more shared print projects are established things may look differently in the future with only 1 or 2 copies retained in the region. Clem disagreed as he felt the political will would not be there for years and relying on copies not held in Maine. Clem went on to say that in Maine there are no Association of Research Libraries, the MSCS libraries are it for Maine. Joan commented that the MSCC MOU and retention commitments will be reviewed every five years, so there is already a chance for MSCC to look again at the length and commitments already made.

b.    Review SCS data reports, graphs & charts – identify potential opportunities & scenarios

c.    Discuss retention criteria ideas – agree on criteria to be applied to data

Andy presented to the Committee some potential opportunities and scenarios for Scenario Two retention criteria.

Andy started off by reminding the Committee that for Scenario Two MSCS were looking at titles held by 3 or more MSCS libraries which accounts for 1,064,333 titles. After removing titles published after 2003 and special collections copies (which will automatically receive CTR’s) that leaves 817,431 titles for consideration.

Andy reviewed the definitions of a ‘title set’, ‘title holding’, and ‘item’ levels. See: MSCS Glossary. Andy also showed examples of decisions which will drive Scenario Two, which are applied at the different ‘title set’, ‘title holding’, and ‘item’ levels.

Andy showed examples of circulation and last circulation date criteria for the Committee to consider. He reminded the Committee that circulation is the most significant criteria and alone accounted for the majority of titles being in the CTR category. Also included in Slide 10 was the concept of committing to keep a minimum title-holding threshold across the MSCS group even if the title did not meet the retention criteria. Andy and Rick pointed out that this was something all other projects they had worked with previously had asked for (usually setting the minimum at two title-holdings) to act as a safety net and ensure that a title is not removed completely from the collective collection. The threshold would trump the retention criteria. Clem felt that adding CTR’s to two holdings would be consistent with what had been decided in Scenario One. Matthew questioned how seeing this data would help the Committee decide the minimum amount of CTR title-holdings.

Andy next showed the impact of adding additional criteria to circulation. Andy confirmed that any and all of the criteria from Scenario One could be used in Scenario Two. The examples Andy used (which had been requested by Matthew) were the impact of requiring rarely-held titles being retained (< 10 US Holdings in OCLC WorldCat) and exempting HathiTrust Public Domain titles from Needs Further Examination status. Andy again emphasized that the impact of individual criteria (other than circulation) is not a big factor on its own for why a title was marked as CTR. Andy confirmed that FRBR can be added to the holding levels in OCLC WorldCat so only specific editions receive the CTR.

Clem commented that he wants MSCS to look only at circulating titles because libraries would not be willing to CTR title that had zero circulations. Matthew responded that in Scenario One, MSCS had committed to retain titles with zero circulation if they were Special Collections/Archives copies, in the local protection category, and only 0-9 copies in OCLC. A discussion then ensued regarding using aggregate circulation across the MSCS group rather than just average for each title-holding separately. Andy commented that other groups SCS had worked with had looked at this and eventually decided against it. Clem clarified that he wants SCS to separate title-sets that have zero circulations at ANY of the MSCS libraries from those title-sets with any circulation. This will require SCS to create multiple lists.

The Committee agreed to Clem’s suggestion of considering title-sets with zero aggregate (any library) circulations separately from circulating title-sets. SCS will supply MSCS with separate lists to review when the group is ready for them. At Deb’s request, the Committee also agreed that title-sets in the HathiTrust Public Domain category will be pulled out of this group for further examination. They will be counted separately and can be supplied in separate lists when MSCS are ready for them. Matthew commented that in Scenario One MSCS had agreed only to not make commitments on titles with zero circulations and available in the HathiTrust.

The Committee agreed to use the Scenario One criteria as a starting point with the understanding that possible modifications may be required, but that by starting with criteria that the MSCS are already familiar with, the Committee will be in a better position to think about modifications or departures from these CTR criteria. SCS will also run three variations of these numbers that correspond to minimum title-holding requirements of zero, one, and two title-holdings per title-set, respectively. Another way to put this is that zero, one, or two title-holdings per title-set will be given a CTR designation regardless of other considerations as to as ensure that the holding requirement is met – and the counts will reflect that. Any holding requirement would only apply to in-scope title-sets.

The Committee also agreed that MSCS would CTR titles which are rare in OCLC (0-9 copies) even if they had zero circulations.

The Committee asked SCS (after applying the criteria to the data) to include example title-sets for them to review.

4.    Deadline extended for 1st Quarter travel claims to September 6th, 2013

Because of today’s meeting and the Director’s meeting tomorrow Matthew extended the travel claim deadline until next Friday September 6th. Matthew will send out a reminder on Monday.