1. Embedding resource sharing evidence in cooperative collection development
9th Annual EBLIP
Philadelphia, PA
20 June 2017
Although much has been written about cooperative collection development and area studies collections, little research exists that assesses the effectiveness of these programs or their impact beyond their home institution. Items in these collections are often scarcely held or “hidden” due to either a lack of specialized knowledge to facilitate their discovery or the financial resources required to maintain them. Such collections require trained personnel with the ability to work with one or more vernacular languages and knowledge of the publishing landscape in different geographic locales. To ensure access to these collections, research libraries developed innovative resource sharing and cooperative collection development schemes in order to provide continued access to materials.
This session will examine lending history of developed area studies collections in order to evaluate the impact of resource sharing and cooperative collection development. By examining five years’ of a major research library’s resource sharing data for outgoing materials in Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) and outgoing materials published with a foreign imprint, the authors will seek to draw conclusions about a cooperatively stewarded collection and make recommendations about the directions that research libraries should pursue in order to provide service at a regional and/or national level.

2. Resource Sharing and Cooperative Collection Development - Ongoing Discussions
International and Area Studies Collections in 21st Century Libraries (Yale University, 2012) -
IFLA Strategic Plan (Hague, 2016) -
Ireland’s memory, Ireland’s discovery, Consortium of National and) University Libraries (CONUL) Strategy (Dublin, 2016) -
Strategy 2013 – 2017, Association of European Research Libraries
Collective Collection: Leverage Our Past to Build Our Future (May 2017), Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Annual Library Conference:
Common Theme: Service at Scale….
These ongoing discussions are happening across institutions, countries, and regions. A few examples include: “International and Area Studies Collections in 21st Century Libraries” in the U.S and the Strategy developed by Irish Consortium of National and University Libraries. Closer to our home, the Big Ten Academic Alliance has just concluded a two day conference focused almost entirely on this issue. These strategic plans and ideas have coalesced around this question: How do we improve existing of models of collaboration, while designing future models for resource sharing through cooperative collection development?

3. Factors shaping these discussions
Local, Regional, and National Constituencies
Consortial Agreements
Institutional Support
Resource Sharing Mechanisms
National and International Publishing Trends
Preservation of Cultural Heritage

4. Our Contributions to these Discussions
“Measuring and Sustaining the Impact of Less Commonly Taught Language Collections in a Research Library” (College & Research Libraries, vol. 76, no. 2, 2015)
"Measuring and Sustaining the Impact of Area Studies Collections in a Research Library: Balancing the Eco-System to Manage Scarce Resources" (Paper presented at the ACRL Conference, Portland, Oregon, March ).

5. Present Study
Examined the use of area studies materials by assessing five years of ILL lending data with local use at University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)
Investigated the similarities and differences between lending of Less Commonly Taught Language (LCT) materials and titles published abroad

6. Research Questions
To what extent such collections and associated services benefit borrowers beyond the community of research universities?
How are the benefits of the lending of specialized materials dispersed across the different geographic regions of the United States and/or the different types of institutions?
How does the impact of materials from area studies change when using the country of imprint rather than language to define the scope of the collection?
How does demand for materials on a particular subject change based on language or country of imprint of those materials?
Is there any correlation between local circulation of area studies materials and interlibrary loan requests for those same materials?
Do more rarely held materials experience the same demand as widely held materials in terms of both local circulation and ILL requests?

7. Methodology
Merged monthly lending reports ( ) to create a single database
This database contained records for 177,366 transactions and 105,849 requests for unique titles
Removed duplicate ILL lending records that appeared in consecutive months (renewals)
Removed ILL lending records for which critical information like imprint and OCLC number were missing

8. Methodology (contd.)
Added a field for “Imprint Country” in the spreadsheet and defined places of publication by contemporary borders
Assigned region names based on Title VI region list, Department of Education
Added OCLC holdings counts showing number of available copies at OCLC member institutions
Included local circulation counts for the same period for each item
The authors made no attempt to deduplicate the titles associated with the OCLC numbers recorded in the ILL data against alternate bibliographic records in OCLC that might represent the same item meaning that there could have been
local circulation associated with the same title cataloged in a variant manner. .

9. Findings
Academic libraries (57.32%) and Major Academic Research Libraries (28.40%) were the primary beneficiary of outgoing lending transactions with Public Libraries receiving the third largest share at 8.87%
Science, Language and Literature, Agriculture, and Fine Arts were most borrowed subject areas
States with the highest percentage of lending transactions were: Michigan (14%), Indiana (9%), Wisconsin (8%), Pennsylvania (7%), and Minnesota (7%)
Two categories which circulate the most (both locally and via ILL) are the most and the least frequently held items
As for the most borrowed subject areas, one question about these is how much those borrowed areas reflected existing collection strengths, institutional history, and the publishing output for the regions in question…..

10. Institutional Type

11. ILL Lending by Region and Language

12. ILL Lending and Local Circulation

13. ILL Lending and Local Circulation
Striking parallel between the ILL and local circulation percentages
More rarely held materials which have only 1-10 copies listed in OCLC account for 15.6% of ILL transactions
The most commonly held materials which have 91 or more copies listed in OCLC account for about 42% of both ILL and local circulation.

14. Imprint Region and Subject

15. Subject and English/Non-English Borrowing
Of interest is that, aside from the close split in the number of loans for Language and Literature, the most popularly borrowed titles sharply divide based on whether they are English or non-English titles.

16. Lending – Item Level All Imprints: Non-US Imprints
88.5 % of all monographs borrowed during the five-year period of our study period were only lent a single time
7,327 monographs were lent out only twice, accounting for 8.9% of lending
Non-US Imprints
Of the 46,612 monographs with non US imprints, the university lent 41,506 monographs only once, accounting for 89% of the total number of non-US imprint monographs that were lent
3,978 items (8.5%) were lent out twice

17. Regional Impact
The states with the highest percentage of lending transactions were: Michigan (14%), Indiana (9%), Wisconsin (8%), Pennsylvania (7%), and Minnesota (7%).

18. International Impact

19. Conclusions
Reducing duplication between institutions could avoid unnecessary redundancy, freeing resources for additional collecting
Potential exists for collections of lower used materials to serve broad scholarly communities through resource sharing
Research libraries can and do serve broad communities – making the realization of collective collections a possibility

20. …and Further Research Needs
Can libraries identify lower-use categories to shape collection development decisions in order to acquire more high-use and/or long-tail items that serve consortial needs?
Policy Implications for Collective Collections
Those collected as “General Collections”
Those collected as “artifacts”… Distinctive Collections
The Collective Collection as Preservation Tool
Impacts on institutional and collective stewardship
Discovery and Technical Challenges – “discovery to delivery”
Agreement on What Constitutes “True” Duplication
I’d still like to suggest we add a conclusion that future studies might identify common qualities of moderately held materials to help ascertain at the point of purchase which categories of materials are seeing lower use and therefore do not need to be as widely held. Those freed up resources should potentially continue to go towards the most widely held and distinctive collections (which leads nicely into the second bullet point).
Policies governing shared collections intended to be used vs. Policies governing shared collections gathered for purposes of preserving cultural heritage

21. Questions?
Tom Teper – Associate University Librarian for Collections and Technical Services
Esra Coşkun – Collections Analysis and Planning Specialist
Mara Thacker – South Asian Studies Librarian
Joe Lenkart – International Reference Librarian

23. Digital vs. Print Delivery by Country