Month: September 2010

Survey Methods

I owe many of my favorite ideas about library preservation assessment to birds and trash. I have a friend who does ornithological research into the effects of habitat development and disturbance on breeding shorebirds, specifically the changing relationship between humans and arctic shorebirds in response to a new landfill in Barrow, Alaska. Birds being generally more migratory and less long-lived than library books, his methodologies for data collection and analysis have always been more agile than mine.

It was only natural to think of him when I happened across a copy of Sokal and Rohlf‘s Introduction to Biostatistics at the Strand a while back. I snapped it up immediately, and it’s turned out to be an enjoyable way to brush up my statistics. One of the reasons that I like biological analogies is the necessity of considering change over time in biological processes. Put another way, biology and preservation are both concerned with the developments of the relationship between inherent and environmental factors. Indeed, the role of “inherent vice” is one of the earliest theoretical models for preservation, even though the term has been deprecated in favor of a permanence/durability model. Sokal and Rohlf make a very powerful observation as they introduce their ideas of biostatistics:

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Webinar: Managing Collections in the Networked Environment: New Analytic Approaches

On September 9 (11:00 am, Pacific Daylight Time , GMT-07:00), I gave a presentation about the preservation review methods that are in development at UCLA Library as part of an OCLC Research Webinar, entitled “Managing Collections in the Networked Environment: New Analytic Approaches.”

Constance Malpas hosted this panel, which featured Helen Look (University of Michigan), Zack Lane (Columbia/ReCAP), and I presenting some of our work on data-driven approaches to library decision-making. Based on the planning calls and the materials we’ve shared, and the broad group of attendees, I think the program had something of value for people in every branch of library science.

Helen and Zack have access to some fantastic system-wide data about print and digital versions of the so-called “collective collection” and are showing interesting patterns in their work. I’m picking up the litter from that perspective to talk about how to deal with severely decayed materials in a way that  protects scarce resources and locally important materials while also pushing the library network to provide the resilience for less threatened materials and to soak up some of the costs of this work.

You can get information about the archived webinar, available on-line and through iTunes U from OCLC’s site: http://www.oclc.org/research/events/webinars.htm

My slides and some rough speaker notes are available in This PDF file, and I’ll post follow-up and further materials at this address (jacobnadal.com/107) after the webinar.