Have you seen the tool that Ithaka developed to determine what print scholarly journals you could withdraw (discard/store) that are already in your digital collections? It’s pretty nifty for a spreadsheet. About 10-15 minutes of playing with it and a list of our print holdings resulted in giving me a list of around 200 or so actionable titles in our collection, which I passed on to our subject liaison librarians.
The guys who designed it are giving some webinar sessions, and I just attended one. Here are my notes, for what it’s worth. I suggest you participate in a webinar if you’re interested in it. The next one is tomorrow and there’s one on February 10th as well.
Background
- They have an organizational commitment to preservation: JSTOR, Portico, and Ithaka S+R
- Libraries are under pressure to both decrease their print collections and to maintain some print copies for the library community as a whole
- Individual libraries are often unable to identify materials that are sufficiently well-preserved elsewhere
- The What to Withdraw framework is for general collections of scholarly journals, not monographs, rare books, newspapers, etc.
- The report/framework is not meant to replace the local decision-making process
What to Withdraw Framework
- Why do we need to preserve the print materials once we have a digital version?
- Fix errors in the digital versions
- Replace poor quality scans or formats
- Inadequate preservation of the digital content
- Unreliable access to the digital content
- Also, local politics or research needs might require access to or preservation of the print
- Once they developed the rationales, they created specific preservation goals for each category of preservation and then determined the level of preservation needed for each goal.
- Importance of images in journals (the digitization standards for text is not the same as for images, particularly color images)
- Quality of the digitization process
- Ongoing quality assurance processes to fix errors
- Reliability of digital access (business model, terms & conditions)
- Digital preservation
- Commissioned Candace Yano (operations researcher at UC Berkeley) to develop a model for copies needed to meet preservation goals, with the annual loss rate of 0.1% for a dark archive.
- As a result, they found they needed only two copies to have a >99% confidence than they will still have remaining copies left in twenty years.
- As a community, this means we need to be retaining at least two copies, if not more.
Decision-Support Tool (proof of concept)
- JSTOR is an easy first step because many libraries have this resource and many own print copies of the titles in the collections and Harvard & UC already have dim/dark archives of JSTOR titles
- The tool provides libraries information to identify titles held by Harvard & UC libraries which also have relatively few images
Future Plans
- Would like to apply the tool to other digital collections and dark/dim archives, and they are looking for partners in this
- Would also like to incorporate information from other JSTOR repositories (such as Orbis-Cascade)
