1. College Libraries, Resource
Provision, and a Collective
Collection
Bob Kieft
Occidental College
kieft@oxy.edu
NITLE, April 11, 2013

2. Blame it on…
• The TriColleges, with assists from CBB,
CTW, and Bridge
• PALCI, PACSCL
• CDL and SCELC
• Rick Lugg, Constance Malpas, Lizanne
Payne, Emily Stambaugh

3. ToC
• Propositions about libraries
• Why “extreme collections” work at
Occidental?
• Colleges and shared collections
• Why shared print
• Why shared print will (eventually) work
– The Devil made me do it
• Keeping up

4. What is a library? 1
• A body of accessible materials
• Staff, tools, and services
• Spaces for working with them
• Node in a network
• Cultural institution
• Site for learning
• Publisher, scholar, scholarly communicator
• Community center

5. What is a library? 2
• The library is many and various and not the same for
everyone on all occasions
• The Web has shown that the library is less about books,
dvds, and 35mm slides than it is about what people do
with texts, images, and sound, less about the medium
than the work that people do
• The library is what Lorcan Demspey calls a “service
bundle,” not a monolithic integration but a set of
possibilities or methods for doing work, of providing
resources to the campus and related communities
• Not the heart of the campus

6. Why at Occidental?
• Academic Commons project
• Building, staff, program
• Collections program
– Reduce space given to print
– No self-storage
– Extended partnerships
– More e, less p
– More use, less resource
– DDA
– Discontents of CA

7. LACs and Collections Planning
The Mono Case
• TriCo and Poughkeepsie 2008
• Ithaka library director survey 2010
• Followup—what’s different about LACs?
– Different in kind from R1s?
– Inhibitors to collection sharing
– Managing growth
– The apocalypse
– What will they do?

8. Why Collective Print?
• Increases preservation capacity.
• Reinvests space.
• Reduces risk of loss of scarce and unique copies.
• Shifts library resources to new services/materials.
• Encourages greater access through digitization.
• Increases support for scholarship through inter-
institutional collaboration.
• Reduces rate of unnecessarily duplicative print collection
growth.

9. Why This Will Work:
Some Assumptions
• Robust user-initiated borrowing networks already exist; additional networks
are forming.
• Regional and national models for housing/archiving journals have emerged
and will for other kinds of materials in three to five years.
• The library will continue to grow, but it will grow mostly in electronic
resources or through the strength, number, and variety of access
partnerships.
• Even though many now say they like e-books for some purposes but will not
read extended text on screen, mass digitization and reading
devices/software improvement are creating a shift away from print.
• Current funding or resource-allocation incentives are too great to do
otherwise.
• Faculty and disciplines differ in their preferences and habits with respect to
library materials, which means libraries can accomplish a lot without
accomplishing the same thing in all areas of the collection.
• Information, discovery, and materials delivery systems are improving.

10. Remember----
Affective dimensions of plans for remote housing for or
collective access to print, especially monographs:
• How to mitigate the sense of loss so many feel in a
program to draw down open-shelf print?
• How to work with the sense some faculty and students
have that “we” are forcing them to change their work
practices and preferences?
• How to work with the sense that print collaboration
affects the identity open-shelf print collections lend some
faculty/disciplines and librarians?
• Can we talk about this without “management speak?”

11. In the Know
• Subscribe to the CRL-sponsored listserv for the “Print Archives Network”
(send a message to listserv@listserv.crl.edu Subscribe PAN “your name”).
• Attend CRL-sponsored PAN Forum, ALA, Fri mornings.
• Read Against the Grain column, “Curating Collective Collections,” edited by
Sam Demas.
• Monitor Rick Lugg’s blog, “Sample and Hold” (http://sampleandhold-
r2.blogspot.com/); follow OCLC Research
• Read background material and a bibliography of recent writing on shared-
print at “Collaborative Retention of Print Monographs”
(http://www.lyrasis.org/Products-and-Services/Grants-and-Special-
Projects/Collaborative-Print-Monograph-Retention.aspx) as summarized in
“A Nation-Wide Planning Framework for Large-Scale Collaboration on
Legacy Print Monograph Collections” (Collaborative Librarianship, 2:4
(2010). 229-233).
• Read elegantly summarized version of the case for shared print by Sam
Demas and Wendy Lougee in “Shared Print Archiving and Formation of a
National Trust: Will your campus participate in a collective print preservation
strategy?” (Library Issues, 31:6 (July 2011).