![An Update on the Eastern
Academic Scholars’ Trust [EAST]
Susan Stearns, John Unsworth, Lizanne
Payne
May 4, 2015](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/eastmondaymay42015webinar-150504083752-conversion-gate01/85/east-monday-may-4-2015-webinar-1-320.jpg)
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East monday may 4 2015 webinar
- 1. An Update on the Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust [EAST] Susan Stearns, John Unsworth, Lizanne Payne May 4, 2015
- 2. Our Agenda • Welcome and introductions – Susan • Major milestones since July, 2014 – John • EAST Goals – John • Collection analysis, retention, access/delivery– Lizanne • What has changed since July, 2014 – Lizanne • Timeline – Lizanne • The validation study – John • Business model, governance, etc. – Susan • Next steps – John • Q&A and discussion - All
- 3. Introductions • Susan Stearns, BLC – anticipated project director for Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant • John Unsworth, Brandeis University and Laura Wood from Tufts University, anticipated co-pi’s for Mellon Foundation grant • Lizanne Payne, Shared Print Consultant – consultant for EAST • Planning committee members Neal Abraham & Chris Loring
- 4. Major Milestones Since July, 2014 • BLC becomes host institution - late fall, 2014 • Formal commitments requested from libraries - December, 2014 • Iterative proposals to Mellon - January – March, 2015 • Anticipated award - early June 2015
- 5. EAST project goals • Analyze 20M+ monographs in order to propose commitments to be made by retention partners • Design, test and analyze a sample-based validation study • Secure retention commitments • Finalize EAST policies and business model • Plan for the future of EAST • Explore relationships with other regional and national shared print programs
- 6. Collection analysis • Very large scale with over 20 million volumes to be analyzed by Sustainable Collections Services (SCS) • Compares circulating monograph holdings of participating members and against WorldCat & others • 40 EAST libraries will participate in first group – 34 new data – 6 recent SCS analyses • Monograph Working Group to make recommendations • Decision support for modeling of various scenarios • Coordination with retention commitments made in Maine Shared Collections and ConnectNY
- 7. Retention in EAST • Minimum of 15 year retention commitment for both monographs and serials • Formal – but lightweight – agreement • Retention commitments to be revisited at least 2 years before they end and at least every 5 years after that • May be recalibrated in light of yet to be established national or international efforts
- 8. Access and delivery • EAST is a light archive • Holdings discoverable using existing systems • Fulfillment of request for materials through ILL using existing systems • Current plan is for no charge for ILL to other EAST members
- 9. What has changed since July 2014? • Mellon grant will support monograph collection analysis and retention effort; EAST will pursue journals and offsite shelving clearinghouse via member funding • EAST plan did not require item validation; Mellon grant will support 2 sample-based validation studies • EAST libraries will review and confirm policies recommended during planning phase
- 10. Timeline • Year 1 June 2015 – June, 2016 – Elect Executive Committee, establish Working Groups – Invoice member fees based on Commitment Form – Hire project staff – Reconfirm or revise policies – Validation study #1 – Monograph collection analysis
- 11. Timeline • Year 2 July 2016 – June 2017 – Validation study #2 – Finalize retention agreements and MOU – Define future EAST membership – Convene planning workshop with other regional/national shared print initiatives
- 12. The Validation Study • Goal is to build trust in retention commitments • EAST will focus on inventory confirmation • Two stage sampling process – Random sample of volumes from full collections – to determine level of confidence in existence – Stratified sample at the consortium level based on level of redundancy – to inform number of copies retained
- 13. Anticipated business model for EAST • Members contribute annual fees to support program management and a portion of collection analysis costs • Staffing = full time project manager, .5 FTE data librarian and statistical consultant • Budget – Mellon contributions for Years 1-2 – Davis contributions for Years 1 and 3 – Membership fees – Set-aside for future collection analyses • Projecting adding Retention Partners in Year 3 with additional round of collection analysis
- 14. The EAST Membership • Two forms of membership – Retention Partners – Supporting Partners • Annual membership fees • Contribution to support large scale [and expensive] collection analysis • 47 current members – 37 as monograph retention partners (some also for journals) – 1 as journal retention partner only – 9 as Supporting Partners
- 15. Next Steps • Face-to-face meeting at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA on Monday, June 22nd • Establish governance – Executive Committee – Working Groups – Collection Analysis, Validation • SCS to kickoff collection analysis project plan
Editor's Notes
- What we know of today as EAST – the Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust - was first known as the Northeast Regional Library Shared Print Project [abbreviated as NERD by some] and was funded by an 18 month planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation focused on establishing a program of shared responsibility among libraries for retaining copies of infrequently used printed works that are nonetheless considered essential to serving the needs of scholars. More than 100 academic librarians from New England, New York and Pennsylvania participated in the planning project, which was hosted and managed by Five Colleges. At the final meeting of this planning phase, in July of last year, the participating libraries agreed to three high level goals for the shared print project, which they renamed EAST – Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust: first, to share stewardship of library print holdings to ensure more effective preservation of the scholarly record while recognizing that some individual institutions may need to take steps to alleviate space pressures Second, to provide access and delivery of the shared materials to meet the needs of scholars, researchers, teachers and their students And, third to provide information to support the needs of libraries for separate contracted offsite shelving for local collections. One final component of the original planning project was determining, via an open RFI process, to engage with Sustainable Collection Services [SCS, now owned by OCLC] to provide the large scale collection analysis that would form the backbone of the project. More on this in a moment. In the fall of last year, the Boston Library Consortium – BLC – agreed to act as the host institution for EAST and to take responsibility for overseeing and administering grant funding to support EAST. And, that brings us to the present. Over the last almost 3 months, we have worked iteratively with the Mellon Foundation to define a 2-years organizational startup project that will definte a distributed and shared collection of monographs and establish the infrastructure necessary to support EAST on an ongoing basis.
- The 6 goals listed here are taken almost verbatim from our recently submitted final proposal to the Mellon Foundation to fund the organizational development of EAST. We are awaiting Mellon’s funding decision, which will be forthcoming in early June. If that funding is approved, we are able to supplement it with generous funding from the Davis Educational Foundation, who will be contributing to the significant costs of the collection analyses required for EAST. This collection analysis is one of the first major goals of the project. We will be working with SCS to analyze monograph holdings of some 40 EAST retention partners, who have agreed to be included in the first cohort. I’ll speak about this in a bit more detail later, but suffice it to say here that this analysis will ultimately allow us to propose the commitments to be made by retention partners and to establish the set of titles needing validation. Although validation was not a goal identified during the original planning project, primarily due to cost, it has become clear as we have worked with the folks at Mellon to strengthen the grant proposal, that some form of validation that retained titles actually exist on the shelves of the retention partners was critical to the success of this project and to the trust that member libraries – and their faculties and administrators – would have in the retention agreements. As a result, we worked to include in EAST a two phase, sample-based validation study which I will discuss further later. Under the recommendation that came out of the planning project, EAST retention partners will commit to hold specified materials for a minimum of 15 years. As part of this project, we will develop a retention agreement document that will include funding, review, validation and renewal of retention commitments. The current EAST business model is built around decentralized print retention and no fee sharing agreements. As part of this project, we will review the model and fine tune it as appropriate. I’ll talk in moment about the EAST membership models. Throughout the two years of the proposed grant funded project, EAST will be planning for the future. In fact, we currently envision that in the 3rd year, the EAST membership could expand with another collection analysis cohort included. Finally, as many of you know, there are current shared print programs already in place and a number of regional and even national initiatives in early planning stages. In will be important that EAST explore collaborative relationships with these programs.
- The 6 goals listed here are taken almost verbatim from our recently submitted final proposal to the Mellon Foundation to fund the organizational development of EAST. We are awaiting Mellon’s funding decision, which will be forthcoming in early June. If that funding is approved, we are able to supplement it with generous funding from the Davis Educational Foundation, who will be contributing to the significant costs of the collection analyses required for EAST. This collection analysis is one of the first major goals of the project. We will be working with SCS to analyze monograph holdings of some 40 EAST retention partners, who have agreed to be included in the first cohort. I’ll speak about this in a bit more detail later, but suffice it to say here that this analysis will ultimately allow us to propose the commitments to be made by retention partners and to establish the set of titles needing validation. Although validation was not a goal identified during the original planning project, primarily due to cost, it has become clear as we have worked with the folks at Mellon to strengthen the grant proposal, that some form of validation that retained titles actually exist on the shelves of the retention partners was critical to the success of this project and to the trust that member libraries – and their faculties and administrators – would have in the retention agreements. As a result, we worked to include in EAST a two phase, sample-based validation study which I will discuss further later. Under the recommendation that came out of the planning project, EAST retention partners will commit to hold specified materials for a minimum of 15 years. As part of this project, we will develop a retention agreement document that will include funding, review, validation and renewal of retention commitments. The current EAST business model is built around decentralized print retention and no fee sharing agreements. As part of this project, we will review the model and fine tune it as appropriate. I’ll talk in moment about the EAST membership models. Throughout the two years of the proposed grant funded project, EAST will be planning for the future. In fact, we currently envision that in the 3rd year, the EAST membership could expand with another collection analysis cohort included. Finally, as many of you know, there are current shared print programs already in place and a number of regional and even national initiatives in early planning stages. In will be important that EAST explore collaborative relationships with these programs.
- Compares circulating monograph holdings of members to identify overlaps, show occurrence of holdings elsewhere [WC, Hathi] and display circulation to highlight candidates for retention or deselection 40 EAST libraries will participate in first group: 34 providing new data and 6 with data from recent SCS analyses Monograph Working Group will be involved in an iterative process to define criteria for retention Based on this, each retention partner - using an interactive database for decision support modeling -will be asked to make retention commitments
- Verification of the existence and condition of titles in distributed circulating collections – known in the shared print world as “validation” – is critical to building trust among partner libraries that retained copies will, in fact, be available and usable. However, validation efforts span a spectrum of goals with increasing levels of effort and cost: First is basic inventory confirmation – is the volume actually on the shelf or otherwise accounted for? A condition review can be done – is the physical volume in good enough condition to support ongoing use? And a bibliographic review can be undertaken – is the volume actually as described in the cataloging metadata? Since the EAST project is focused on retention and is not envisioned as a full-scale preservation effort, we will initially look at inventory confirmation. EAST will establish a Validation Working Group to design and execute a 2 stage sample of member library and consortial collections to establish the level of confidence in individual collections and to determine the value of redundancy across collection. The first phase will draw a random sample of titles from the total population of each Retention Partner’s collection. We expect to do this on a rolling basis, library by library. This work is dependent upon the grant funding and would be coordinated by the central EAST staff in order to minimize the work required of an individual library. We expect this first phase will provide us with some form of metric to evaluate reliability of the likelihood of a given title being present at a specific EAST Retention Partner library. The second phase of the validation study will draw a stratified sample across ALL of the titles planned for retention. Each stratum of the sample will represent a different level of redundancy – that is, the total number of copies planned for retention. We will design the sampling to determine what level of redundancy offsets the risk of low inventory while avoiding levels of duplication that are statistically unlikely to make a difference in ensuring the existence of a usable copy. This, in turn, will inform the level of redundancy EAST members would regard as close enough total reliability. The overall goal of this validation study is to establish and document the degree of confidence and the possibility of error, in any EAST members’ commitment to retain a particular titles. Financially, this research – which would be totally grant funded initially – should also tell us initial and ongoing costs of providing different levels of confidence in a shared print retention agreement based in circulating collections. Our goal is to find the balance between confidence and costs – a financially sustainable model of validation that provides sufficient confident [particularly when combined with redundancy of copies retained] to allow for responsible deselection by member libraries.
- Business is built around decentralized print retention (storing in situ by member libraries) and sharing agreements. Due to the costs associated with initial implementation, including the collection analysis and validation studies, grant funding is required for the initial organizational development. As I mentioned, members will contribute to these implementation costs via their annual fees and those participating in the collection analysis will also make a modes contribution to offset these costs, which are primarily covered via grant funding. We are projecting that in Year 3, additional retention partners will join EAST and we will undertake another round of collection analysis, and potentially replicate some form of validation. On an ongoing basis, sustainability with the modest EAST staff is supportable from the annual membership fees.
- Last December, the Five Colleges and the BLC approached the 60+ libraries who had expressed interest in participating in EAST and requested a firmer commitment. By late January, we had 44 firm commitments to join EAST and that number has risen to 47 today. The majority of the EAST members are Retention Partners who will participate in the large scale collection analysis and agree to make commitments to retain particular titles in their local collections and make them available for sharing with other EAST libraries. These retention partners will pay an annual membership fee in EAST and a one-time contribution to offset the collection analysis costs, which are substantially grant funded. A few libraries are joining EAST as Supporting Partners, who pay a comparable annual membership fee and may or may not choose to participate in the collection analysis. If they so choose, they make a modest contribution as well. However, Supporting Partners will not be making explicit retention commitments. In addition to these individual library members, EAST will also work with two existing regional consortia – the Maine Shared Collections and the ConnectNY group. Both of these groups – at least some member libraries – have undertaken collection analyses in the past and have retention commitments in place. We will be reviewing these in the context of the EAST project so that we can best insure effective coordination.
- Project Manager to be hired to manage implementation of EAST, coordinate outreach and explore collaboration with related shared print programs Data Librarian [half-time] to be hired to focus on collection analysis and validation study Lizanne Payne, Shared Print Consultant Statistical Consultant to design and analyze validation study Mellon grant John Unsworth, Brandeis and Laura Wood, Tufts are co-PI’s Susan Stearns is Project Director