Some remarks related to two recent snippets from reading about the evolving landscape of shared collections:
From Rick Lugg (http://sampleandhold-r2.blogspot.com/2011/02/misspent-funds-or-strategic-reserve.html)
A strategic reserve of both print and digital scholarship seems an obvious choice. But like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, this should be coordinated at the national or regional level, and the costs should be borne by the entire community which depends upon that reserve. As a community, we have begun to move in this direction, through participation in trusted print repositories and trusted digital repositories such as Hathi Trust. Investment in these programs, through both dollars and contributed collections, will gradually assure that “misspent funds” are converted to something more lasting and cost-effective.
From Gary Frost (http://futureofthebook.com/2011/01/booknotes-74/)
From remote storage to high density storage to shared print archive, the revamp of the status of print continues. The preservation perspective is in revamp as well. At first the attractions of security and more optimal storage provided benefit. Then the dissolve of classified shelving, more sweeping relocation and disaster risk caused pause. Now systematic discard is pending.
I will add a few notes for preservation management in this context.
First is that Rick has picked up on a critical strategic point with his observation about misspent funds needing to be converted into something more effective. There is no research library preservation program in the nation that has enough resources — people, tools, funding, count them however you will — to effect a meaningful improvement in the condition of their institution’s total collection in any sort of meaningful planning horizon. That does not mean that preservation resource expenditures are inherently ineffective; it means that preservation resource expenditures are often applied at the wrong scale. A potential virtue of shifting large-scale collection management to a collective could be that the collective together can offer more appropriately scaled preservation resources or that the local library could more easily discern the subset of its holdings that merit preservation attention and might be able to deploy preservation resources that are effectively scaled in relation to that subset.
Second is that I think Gary’s remarks on my post about serials overlap has accurately described the overall pattern and potential risk, but he has chosen some singular word forms where I believe plurals are more accurate and lead to a meaningful difference in how we need to respond. In particular, Gary highlights concerns about disaster risks and systematic discard.
On systematic discard, I only want to suggest that we should be cautious of a slippery slope argument. I am aware of widespread attention to systems for discard, but that is different than widespread action. I suspect the real terrain is complicated and marked by a variety of elevations and obstacles, in addition to some steep hills and sheer cliffs.
On disaster risks, I think that Gary is alluding to a key tenant of preservation, that the multiplication of copies mitigates against loss, especially when those copies are spatially discontiguous, or if you prefer the technical formulation, lots of copies keeps stuff safe. Shared print archives appear to violate this principle by collocating materials. Another key tenant of preservation is that collections require fortification against the environment and storage that is designed on radically different principles than human comfort. Shared print archives appear to support this principle by collocating materials in purpose-built facilities for collections storage.
I encourage us to collectively move beyond seeing this a matter of conflicting principles that require compromise and instead, as distinct tones that require harmonization. If we start with A – A# – C# and get to G – B – D, we can expect a sense of relief. We should be resolving dissonance to consonance, and adjusting our expectation of successful librarianship from monotonous rule-following toward polyphonic invention.
Shared print interests me as a preservation strategy precisely because it harmonizes two axiomatic approaches to preservation that seemed to be in conflict. There seems to be a possibility that we can maintain multiple copies in multiple sites and make sure those sites are appropriately fortified, even though there are fewer copies in fewer total sites and the protective fortifications also serve as distribution hubs.