North American Storage Trust (NAST) – Project History
Note: This project has been completed.
In 1999 members of the of
the Association of South Eastern Research Libraries Association (ASERL)
began discussing a cooperative "shared virtual storage" project. The
project was originally conceived by Paul Willis, dean of libraries at
the University of Kentucky, and Paul Gherman, university librarian of
Vanderbilt University, as an effort to promote shared institutional
commitments to retaining and sharing research collections held in
offsite library storage facilities. The idea gained further traction
during a 2002 ARL/OCLC Forum on Future
Library Architecture, when Don Kelsey (library facilities planner at
the University of Minnesota) observed that at least some offsite
library storage collections will "never be weeded"—suggesting
that a shared pool of low-use research collections could effectively be
maintained in perpetuity.
In 2003 OCLC Research
staff undertook a special project to identify unique holdings in
Vanderbilt University Library's collections. When compared to WorldCat
collections as a whole, some 24,000 titles were found to be held by
Vanderbilt University alone. Additional analysis was performed to
identify "true last copies" within Vanderbilt's collections,
effectively confirming that a systemwide approach to collection
management could enable the institution to make wise weeding and
preservation decisions. Results of this study were published in College
and Research Libraries; a preprint is available here.
In 2004 in collaboration
with OCLC, 9 ASERL members participated in a collection assessment
exercise directed at identifying overlaps in regional library holdings
and opportunities for systemwide rationalization of collections. These
efforts are described in an April 2005 article on ASERL's Virtual Storage/Preservation Concept
and in an Overview of ASERL's Proposed Virtual Storage
System (May 2005). The ASERL overlap study confirmed that
economies of scale could be achieved if member institutions adopted a
cooperative collection management regime.
In 2006 OCLC surveyed 500
member libraries in North America to explore the level of community
interest in a systemwide approach to managing print collections. Three
concepts embodying different levels of cooperative engagement were
tested, ranging from a simple data-sharing scheme to a transformative
model that would consolidate low-use collections in a shared physical
space and provide participants with cost-effective access and
preservation services. Results from the survey were presented at the
October 2006 meeting of the Association of Research Libraries and are
summarized here. A group of research
institutions interested in advancing the vision of shared print
management coalesced in the North American Storage Trust (NAST).
In 2007, RLG Programs agreed to help the NAST partnership transition from a loose confederation of institutions with a shared interest in leveraging existing library storage capacity toward a community-oriented effort in defining service requirements. With OCLC product managers, Programs staff facilitated discussions with the NAST steering committee, helped to raise community awareness of the virtual shared storage concept within the research library community, and identified components of an emerging registry-based OCLC service architecture that could support shared collection management.
A series of phone interviews with managers of shared print repositories in the US and Canada helped to identify gaps in current policy frameworks and core infrastructure requirements for multi-institutional collection sharing. A parallel effort to identify data requirements for a registry of items held in library storage was also undertaken. Two focus groups of institutions currently managing offsite collections were convened to identify data elements for a specially adapted collection analysis report, intended to help library managers make local decisions based on the availability and preservation status of items held in remote storage facilities.
Results from these parallel exercises were presented at a meeting of the NAST interest group at the ALA Midwinter meeting in January 2007 and are available here:
Programs staff and OCLC product managers continued to work through the spring and early summer to define business and community requirements for a pilot project that would enable NAST participants to pool information about library storage holdings and evaluate its utility in collective decision-making about the disposition of local print collections.
At the ALA Annual Conference in June 2007, the NAST pilot implementation was successfully transitioned from RLG Programs to OCLC product management and the launch of the Cooperative Collection Management Trust was announced. A presentation summarizing the history of the NAST effort and outlining RLG's continuing program of work in Shared Print Collections marked the close of this project, which was one of the first to explore Programs' role in scoping new OCLC service opportunities.
Related work:
Shared Print Collections
|
Librarians' Toolbox:
