Interrogating the collective collection

A message from Lorcan Dempsey

The realities of managing a print collection have been central to the design of library buildings and to library organization. In recent years we have seen a change. Library buildings are being designed around user experiences rather than around collections, and services have peeled away from collections. For many, the opportunity costs of managing large print collections are becoming apparent. At the same time, the importance of digital and licensed collections of various sorts has increased.

Of course, print books remain central to research, learning and personal development. But the way in which we manage them may change. And indeed, we are seeing print collections become the subject of shared attention as system-wide approaches emerge. Libraries are beginning to evolve arrangements that will facilitate long-term shared management of the print literature as individual libraries begin to manage down their local capacity. In this way, a collective responsibility can be exercised while more effectively sharing the task. This will be a complicated process as shared organizational arrangements develop and as libraries deal with user expectations that change at different rates.

Examples of initiatives here are the WEST Project and the print management activities of the HathiTrust. Initially, attention was focused on journal runs, but it is now spreading to monographs, as well. Of course, libraries have long worked with print repositories, individually or in shared settings. However, a more systemic perspective is now emerging and we have been using the phrase "collective collection" to evoke this more focused attention on collective development, management and disclosure of collections across groups of libraries at different levels.

In a major shift, a shared approach to print management is on the rise, and we anticipate that a large part of existing print collections, distributed across many libraries, will move into coordinated or shared management within a few years. This may involve physical consolidation, or a more distributed approach where individual libraries declare commitments around parts of their collections. In this way, some attention shifts from the institution to supra-institutional structures as the venue for print collection management. Policy, organizational and service arrangements are now emerging around this trend.

This development has been a major interest for OCLC Research. Given the availability of WorldCat and our interest in shared library activity, we have done quite a bit of work on analyzing the collective collection. We have three broad interests . . .

1. Understanding the characteristics of the collective print collection: how it is distributed across libraries and regions; its composition in terms of age, subject, copyright status and so on; levels of overlap, rarity and distinctiveness.
2. Supporting policy and service decision-making with good intelligence based on WorldCat and other data resources.
3. Understanding patterns or trends within the scholarly and cultural record. This is akin to "culturomics" (Michel et al. 2011) or "distant reading" agendas (Moretti 2013), which apply data-mining techniques to large aggregations of digitized text and metadata. It is a relatively new interest, and is an area where we would like to encourage others to use WorldCat as a scholarly resource.

We were pleased to recently publish a report which pulls together much of our work under 1 and 2: Understanding the Collective Collection: Towards a System-wide Perspective on Library Print Collections. The work represented here has been influential in providing an evidence base for policy and service discussions around the collective collection, and we continue to work on this topic. For example, we are completing an analysis of patterns of holdings and inter-library lending in CIC libraries.

We also do work under 3, recognizing the usefulness of Worldcat. Two recent examples here. A small piece of work carried out by Roy Tennant on words in book titles was picked up by The Atlantic and other media outlets. And Brian Lavoie has developed an approach to characterizing the contribution to the scholarly record of a country—charting influential authors, books and patterns of publication. We have published a report on Scotland and have one on New Zealand in preparation.  

We believe that the value of Worldcat to support this type of work grows as it expands to include more library collections around the world. We are always interested in hearing about ways in which we might use this amazing resource to answer new questions.

References

Michel, Jean-Babtist, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, John Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, Erez Lieberman Aiden. 2011. Science. 331 (6014): 176-182. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/176.abstract#aff-10.

Moretti, Franco. 2013. Distant Reading. London: Verso.
http://www.worldcat.org/title/distant-reading/oclc/813931586&referer=brief_results.