83 research outputs found
Lunch with Presentation: Into the Widening Gyre: Libraries in the Open Ecosystem
No full textThe Open ecosystem is transforming library operations, generating significant benefits with equally important tradeoffs. In this session, Constance Malpas (Director of Strategic Programs, OCLC) will reflect on the evolution of the Open landscape, which has expanded from an initial focus on Open Access to scholarly literature, to include efforts in Open Education, support for Open Science workflows, and community investment in Open infrastructures. The Open landscape offers tantalizing new opportunities
Kiwis in the collection: the New Zealand presence in the published record
No full textThis report characterizes the size and scope of the New Zealand presence in the published record, highlights some of its salient characteristics, and describes its diffusion around the world.
Introduction
Despite its small size and relatively brief national history, New Zealand boasts a distinguished presence in the published record. Authors such as Margaret Mahy and Katherine Mansfield; the renowned soprano Kiri Te Kanawa; and contemporary film icons such as the actor Russell Crowe and producer Peter Jackson are just a few of the well-known names associated with New Zealand’s creative tradition, along with internationally acclaimed works such as the Oscar-nominated film Whale Rider and the Booker Prize-winning novel The Bone People. New Zealand’s presence in the published record includes many other individuals and works — some widely known, others less so — adding up to a significant contribution to the global corpus of published materials. Indeed, just as New Zealand’s iconic kiwi birds lay the largest egg in proportion to their size of any bird species in the world 1, the New Zealand contribution to the published record too seems outsized in comparison to the nation’s small geography and population
Stewardship of the evolving scholarly record: from the invisible hand to conscious coordination
No full textThe scholarly record is increasingly digital and networked, while at the same time expanding in both the volume and diversity of the material it contains. The long-term future of the scholarly record cannot be effectively secured with traditional stewardship models developed for print materials. This report describes the key features of future stewardship models adapted to the characteristics of a digital, networked scholarly record, and discusses some practical implications of implementing these models.
Key highlights include:
As the scholarly record continues to evolve, conscious coordination will become an important organizing principle for stewardship models.
Past stewardship models were built on an "invisible hand" approach that relied on the uncoordinated, institution-scale efforts of individual academic libraries acting autonomously to maintain local collections.
Future stewardship of the evolving scholarly record requires conscious coordination of context, commitments, specialization, and reciprocity.
With conscious coordination, local stewardship efforts leverage scale by collecting more of less.
Keys to conscious coordination include right-scaling consolidation, cooperation, and community mix.
Reducing transaction costs and building trust facilitate conscious coordination.
Incentives to participate in cooperative stewardship activities should be linked to broader institutional priorities.
The long-term future of the scholarly record in its fullest expression cannot be effectively secured with stewardship strategies designed for print materials. The features of the evolving scholarly record suggest that traditional stewardship strategies, built on an “invisible hand” approach that relies on the uncoordinated, institution-scale efforts of individual academic libraries acting autonomously to maintain local collections, is no longer suitable for collecting, organizing, making available, and preserving the outputs of scholarly inquiry.
As the scholarly record continues to evolve, conscious coordination will become an important organizing principle for stewardship models. Conscious coordination calls for stewardship strategies that incorporate a broader awareness of the system-wide stewardship context; declarations of explicit commitments around portions of the local collection; formal divisions of labor within cooperative arrangements; and robust networks for reciprocal access. Stewardship strategies based on conscious coordination involve an acceleration of an already perceptible transition away from relatively autonomous local collections to ones built on networks of cooperation across many organizations, within and outside the traditional cultural heritage community
University Futures, Library Futures: Aligning library strategies with institutional directions
No full textUniversity Futures, Library Futures: Aligning library strategies with institutional directions establishes a new framework for understanding the fit between emerging library service paradigms and university types.Supported in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, project leads Constance Malpas, Lorcan Dempsey, and Rona Stein from OCLC Research and Roger Schonfeld and Deanna Marcum of Ithaka S+R, examined the impact of increased institutional differentiation in universities on the organization of academic libraries and the services they provide.As libraries move away from a collections model in which libraries measure their success by how large their collections are, this report puts a framework around library services, explores emerging patterns in different institutional settings, and gauges the importance of these services areas—now and for the future—according to surveyed library directors.The work has three main components:a working model of US higher education institutions that is characterized by educational activity (Research, Liberal Education, Career-directed) and mode of provision (traditional-residential and new-traditional-flexible)a library services framework that covers nine key areascomparison of the above two to test the hypothesis that the services portfolio of libraries map onto the institutional priorities of their host universit
Cloud-sourcing research collections: Managing print in the mass-digitized library environment
No full textThe emergence of a mass-digitized book corpus has the potential to transform the academic library enterprise, enabling an optimization of legacy print collections that will substantially increase the efficiency of library operations and facilitate a redirection of library resources in support of a renovated library service portfolio.
Executive Summary
The Cloud Library project was jointly designed and executed by OCLC Research, the HathiTrust, New York University’s Elmer Holmes 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 following overarching hypothesis provided a framework for our investigation:
• The emergence of a mass-digitized book corpus has the potential to transform the academic library enterprise, enabling an optimization of legacy print collections that will substantially increase the efficiency of library operations and facilitate a redirection of library resources in support of a renovated library service portfolio.
From this, a number of research questions emerged:
• What is the scope of the mass-digitized book corpus in the HathiTrust Digital Libray and to what degree does it replicate print collections held in academic research libraries?
• Can public domain content in the HathiTrust Digital Library provide a suitable surrogate for low-use print collections in academic libraries?
• Is there sufficient duplication between shared print storage repositories and the HathiTrust Digital Library to permit a significant number of academic libraries to optimize and reduce total spending on local print management operations?
• What operational gains might be obtained through a selective externalization of collection management activities?
Based on a year-long study of data from the HathiTrust, ReCAP, and WorldCat, we concluded that our central hypothesis was successfully confirmed: there is sufficient material in the mass-digitized library collection managed by the HathiTrust to duplicate a sizeable (and growing) portion of virtually any academic library in the United States, and 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.
Significantly, we also found that the combination of a relatively small number of potential shared print providers, including the Library of Congress, was sufficient to achieve more than 70% coverage of the digitized book collection, suggesting that shared service may not require a very large network of providers.
Analysis of the distribution of subject matter and library holdings represented in the HathiTrust Digital Library and shared print repositories further confirmed that the digital corpus is largely representative of the collective academic library collection, suggesting a broad potential market for service. A further positive finding was that monographic titles in the humanities constitute the greatest part of the mass-digitized resource, which may indicate that some relatively under-resourced disciplines will begin to benefit from a digital transformation that has already powered enormous innovation in the sciences. As detailed below, we also found that substantial library space savings and cost avoidance could be achieved if academic institutions outsourced management of redundant low-use inventory to shared service providers.
Our findings also revealed some important obstacles and limitations to implementing changed print management practices in the current library operating environment. The following are among the most important constraints we identified:
• The proportion of public domain content in the HathiTrust Digital Library is relatively small (approximately 16% of titles in June 2010) and typically represents material that is not widely held in the library system; as a result, the number of libraries that might hope to reduce local print management costs for these titles through negotiated agreements with the HathiTrust and shared print providers is quite low. Moreover, the age and subject distribution of titles in the public domain is not representative of academic research collections as a whole. In sum, the public domain corpus as currently defined by U.S. copyright law cannot be considered a viable surrogate for any academic print collection.
• While significant duplication was found between the HathiTrust Digital Library and multiple large-scale library storage collections, it was apparent that no single print storage repository could offer coverage sufficient to enable significant space savings or cost avoidance for a given client library. Put another way, effective shared print storage solutions will depend upon a network of providers who will need to optimize holdings as a collective resource.
• The absence of a robust discovery and delivery service based on collective print storage holdings is an impediment to changed print management strategies, especially for digitized titles in copyright.
It is our strong conviction, based on the above findings, that academic libraries in the United States (and elsewhere) should mobilize the resources and leadership necessary to implement a bridge strategy that will maximize the return on years of investment in library print collections while acknowledging the rapid shift toward online provisioning and consumption of information. Even, and perhaps especially, in advance of any legal outcome on the Google Book Search settlement, academic libraries have a unique opportunity to reconfigure print supply chains to ensure continued library relevance in the print supply chain. In the absence of a licensing option, online access to most of the digitized retrospective literature will be severely constrained.
Demand for print versions of digitized books will continue to exist and libraries will be motivated to meet it, but they will need to do so in more cost-effective ways. In the absence of fully available online editions, full-text indexing of digitized in-copyright material provides a means of moderating and tuning demand for print versions and should facilitate the transfer of an increasing part of the print inventory to high-density warehouses. Viewed in this light, shared print storage repositories could enable a significant and positive shift in library resources toward a more distinctive and institutionally relevant service portfolio
Jules Guérin Makes his Market: the Social Economy of Orthopaedic Medicine in Paris, c. 1825–1845
No full textRight-scaling Stewardship: A Multi-scale Perspective on Cooperative Print Management
No full text<p>This research report examines library print management strategies from a group (consortial) and regional perspective, exploring levels of duplication and distinctiveness at a variety of scales to illuminate the costs and benefits of collaborative stewardship strategies. Data for this analysis was drawn from a January 2013 snapshot of the WorldCat union catalog of library holdings.</p
Strength in Numbers: The Research Libraries UK (RLUK) Collective Collection
No full textResearch libraries are exploring opportunities to cooperatively address areas of mutual need, including collection management and the long-term stewardship of the legacy print investment. Analysis of collective collections is a valuable source of insight and intelligence to support planning in an environment where libraries seek to create value through collective action and shared capacities. In partnership with Research Libraries UK (RLUK), OCLC Research has produced a detailed characterization of the collective collection of the RLUK membership, with special emphasis on print books. This report examines the size, scope, and overlap patterns of the RLUK collective collection, supplemented with additional perspective from comparison to the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) collective collection and the global library system as a whole. This study is of particular interest to the RLUK membership, but is also relevant to any group of higher education institutions engaged in, or planning, cooperative efforts around their collections
Toward a New Understanding of American Higher Education Institutions: Focus of Educational Offer, Mode of Provision - Preview Literature Review
No full textThe OCLC Research Library Partnership Web Archiving Metadata Working Group (WAM) was formed to recommend descriptive metadata best practices for archived web content. When the group began its work early in 2016, we discovered that metadata practitioners had high hopes that it would be possible to extract descriptive metadata from harvested content.This report offers our objective analysis of 11 tools in pursuit of an answer to that question. We reviewed selected web harvesting tools to determine their descriptive metadata functionalities. The question we sought to answer was this: Can web harvesting tools automatically generate descriptive metadata that supports the discoverability of archived web resources? Auto-generation of descriptive metadata for archived web resources could result in significant gains in the efficiency of data entry and thus help enable metadata production at scale. Our intent was twofold: 1) provide the web archiving community with a description of each relevant tool's overall purpose and metadata-related capabilities, and 2) inform WAM's overarching objective of preparing best practice recommendations for web archiving descriptive metadata based on an understanding of user needs.
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