The OCLC Research Library Partnership

Collection Building and Operational Impacts Working Group

Background

Archives and special collections are charged both with collecting records that document our society and its institutions and with the ongoing, responsible stewardship of these records. Yet many archives and special collection units struggle to manage the volume of material under their care with significant backlogs of poorly described and preserved materials, creating a fundamental breach of the trust we hold with our donors and our users.

The profession has made remarkable strides in the last two decades to develop thoughtful, rigorous methodologies to carry out cataloging and processing work in a more efficient manner, but this work alone has only made a dent in backlogs. In addition to such methodologies, the 2017 Research and Learning Agenda for Archives, Special and Distinctive Collection in Research Libraries called for a renewed energy around appraisal as part of comprehensive strategies to fulfill our stewardship obligations.

A key to making informed collection development, appraisal, and processing decisions is a strong understanding of the necessary institutional resources and capacity for the work to preserve, describe, store, and make accessible collection material. But in many institutions, those tasked with building collections are separate from those tasked with the ongoing stewardship work of collections, and institutions may lack clear, timely, and actionable information on the institution’s capacity to care for its collections, making a holistic approach to acquisition, appraisal, and stewardship decisions especially challenging.

Impacts

This working group will explore the intersections between current collecting and collection management practices, seek ways to better integrate collection management considerations into the collection development process, and bring together colleagues across these important, interdependent functions. Taking into consideration the cost to acquire, care for, and manage an acquisition, the labor and specialized skills required to do that work, and institutional capacity to take on caring for and storing a particular collection, and borrowing from the Digital Curation Centre’s digital curation lifecycle model, the group aims to develop a lifecycle framework for thinking about the full range of resources necessary to responsibly acquire and steward archives, special, and rare book collections, and the impact that collection acquisitions have on operational capacities.

Outputs

Total Cost of Stewardship: An Annotated Bibliography for Responsible Collection Building

16 March 2021

Chela Scott Weber, Martha O’Hara Conway, Nicholas Martin, Gioia Stevens, Brigette Kamsler.

The Total Cost of Stewardship framework is a holistic approach to understanding the resources needed to responsibly acquire and steward archives and special collections. Included materials: Research Report, Annotated Bibliography, and Tool Suite, which includes a Manual, Cost Estimators, and Communication Tools.