The PAN Forum met Friday, January 26, 2019, in Seattle, Washington for another informative event. Presentations updated the seventy-eight attendees about shared print programs. The meeting focused on research relevant to shared print programs.

Tools for Shared Print

A major theme of the PAN Forum continues to be tools for shared print. These tools help with communication and decision making, and bridge the physical distance between collections. Below are tools that were reported for this PAN meeting.

• Viva is developing a tool for visualizing their cooperatively held collection. This tool functions as their union list and shows at a glance what the collection holds for a variety of criteria.
• StackR is an open source tool for Collection analysis built at Dartmouth Universities. StackR analyzes deaccession lists based on criteria created by Dartmouth librarians and faculty selectors. Some of the criteria include curricular needs, duplicate copies within the library, and availability. StackR provides graphics that help selectors quickly evaluate what to deaccess.
• The Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc. (PALCI) is going to build out an existing tool to meet the needs of its shared print programs. They have changed focus from building a shared-print facility to building a shared collection that will leverage the smaller member library’s collections. They plan to develop an open source platform for resource sharing, using their EZ-Borrow platform.
• Scholars Trust also reports it may enhance JRNL. The tool is currently being reviewed by the JRNL oversight committee for potential enhancements as a decisions support tool.

Research for Shared Print

Three presentations at PAN focused on research in the field of Shared print.

The first project was a Presentation entitled Everything not saved will be lost: Preservation in the age of shared print and withdrawal Projects provided the preservation librarian's point of view on shared print. Their presentation was based on the work of a self-nominating group of six preservation librarians. The group looked at monograph withdrawal practices at ninety-nine ARL and Oberlin Group Libraries. They surveyed these libraries and reviewed their MOU's and other administrative guidelines to evaluate the number of preservation practices included. In general they were alarmed because it was evident withdrawing libraries did not consider preservation when deaccessing. Some of the problems they pointed out included data quality and loss due to gaps, access policies and condition issues. They conclude with the thought that libraries must pay attention to logistical issues, scalability, and ideal policies associated with shared-print retention and preservation.

In the second presentation, Matt Barnes of OCLC and Amy Wood of CRL provided an update on their collaborative Mellon funded grant project to make actionable data accessible for shared-print serials management. Their work intends to improve the infrastructure to register shared-print retention commitments. The first quarter of the two-year project (2018-2020) has been spent gathering information from stakeholders, identifying essential data elements to include and discuss various workflow scenarios. Amy Wood provided confirmation that the project was on schedule and that OCLC and CRL were working together to ensure that project related improvements would enable CRL's PAPR database and OCLC's WorldCat database to share data to ensure librarians have access to the data they need for shared print related decision-making and collection management. CRL's web page https://www.crl.edu/infrastructure-shared-print-collections has up-to-date information about the project's progress, and related events and news.

Marie Waltz from CRL discussed CRL's NEH grant-funded project Mining Serials Reformatting Data for Preservation. This planning grant assembled a test bed of bibliographic and other records for historical print serials reformatted through key humanities preservation, microfilming programs, and credible digitization efforts. Some findings indicate that locating catalog records for these titles were sometimes difficult. Catalog records were not always cataloged with enough information to identify them as reformatted titles paid for through grant projects. Also, although the records can be included in PAPR, it is unclear if shared-print programs consider a microfilm copy to be of equal value to a print version.

Highlights from PAN

The Michigan Shared Print Initiative (MI-SPI) has entered a new phase of organizational development. In September 2018 the members of MI-SPI voted to formalize the governance structure. Members signed an MOU that outlined governance and responsibilities. The next step is to focus on developing standards for 583’s, creating a policy for validation of content and gathering best practices for resource sharing. Task forces have been appointed to address these activities.

SCELC has the potential to double its membership size. The California State University system has decided to allow its 23 member libraries to opt in to SCELC shared print activities. SCELC is entering its second phase of analysis from SCS and will include these new members in its analysis work. PAN received its first update from Keep@Downsview. The update provides an introduction to their program. Their focus has been on important lesser used print journals and serials from members. There are currently at 3.3 million volumes in the collection. We welcome their contributions to the PAN forum.

Find all the Presentations and Updates on the PAN Page.