1. ReCAP: A Model for Shared Print Collections and Off-site Storage
VALE Users/NJLA CUS/NJ ACRL Conference
January 9, Rutgers University, Piscataway
David Magier
AUL for Collection Development, Princeton
Jacob Nadal
Exec. Director, ReCAP
Richard Schulz AUL for Technical Services, Princeton

2. The New York Public Library
History of ReCAP
The Research Collections and Preservation Consortium was founded by three partner libraries:
Columbia University
The New York Public Library
Princeton University
ReCAP began as a way to share the costs of operating a high-bay high-density collections storage facility, for three distinct collections
ReCAP is developing into a preservation center, providing safe storage, coordinating long-term care and ensuring access to a shared collection
ReCAP was founded at the turn of the century by three partner libraries, Columbia University, Princeton University, and The New York Public Library. At the time, these libraries were largely facing a problem of storage space, and as an adjunct to that, needed to make the preservation environment and service costs associated with the less used parts of the collection more affordable.
At present, ReCAP holds over 11 million items – from individual monographs and films to volumes of serial publications and a fast growing contingent of archival containers. Each month we circulate about 15,000 items per month, about 1-2% of total holdings, and add around 50-60,000 items.

3. Accessioning Materials are sorted by size, in three-dimensions
14 different HxW groups in standard size trays, to control D
3:1 to 4:1 improvement in space utilization over call number order, open-stacks setups
Unique item barcode is linked to a tray barcode
Three counts (number of items in the tray)
Two barcode scans (tray bc, then each item bc)
Tray code is linked to a shelf barcode and position.
1 (rear left) -16 (front left), clockwise
Allows for fast, reliable retrieval.
3-4 staff on retrieval; often <1 minute per item.

4. Trays and Size Chart Size Max Width Height AL 5.75 7.25 AH 5.75 8.25BL BH CL CH DL DH EL EH EX

5. The obligatory glamour shot
By bringing lots of things together in one place, it’s easier to find and get them, and the per-item costs of “keeping” can be highly optimized. Those low item-level costs constitute major capital costs, however.
MODULE 2: Aisle 12
The obligatory glamour shot

6. Content and Services
Princeton has 2.8 million items in ReCAP, NYPL: 4.8 million, Columbia: 4.7 million
Total: 12.3 million items, including monographs and serials, archival collections, film, photography, audio and video media, and more, in over 400 languages.
Estimate that 10% are duplicates; 1% triplicates
Cold storage (TWPI 200+) with numerous loss control systems
4-5x slower rate of decay than convectional stacks
Retrievals: 15-25,000 / month
Includes EDD: 500-1,000
And ILL/BD: 1,500-2,000

7. ReCAP at Present Three collections in a shared building
Independent policies for selection, acquisition, circulation, and management of collections
Partnership shares capital and operations costs:
Activity
Space
Administrative Staff
50%
Operational Staff
80%
20%
Cleaning
75%
25%
Repairs & Maintenance
Utilities
Roads, Grounds, & Security
Insurance
All Other Administrative
Princeton Mgmt Fee
60%
40%
Major Maintenance
“Return on investment over an extended period,” is pretty close to my own working definition of preservation: sustainable activities, optimized over time, that maintain or improve the usability of information resources.
In this context, I think “extended” probably means something like “more than two strategic planning cycles” or “beyond the legal mandate for retaining financial records.”
That’s only 10 years or so. With that in mind, it’s instructive to think of ReCAP as just entering its second “extended” phase of development. At present, ReCAP is effectively three collections in a shared building, supported by shared services, with no major capital projects on deck until about 2020.
The partners have independent policies for selection, acquisition, circulation, and management of collections, however.

8. New Directions
With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ReCAP investigated:
Shared collections among the partners
Makes more resources available to each partner, more quickly
Cooperative collection development
Lowers cost per partner for access to comprehensive collections
Long-term preservation commitments
Ensures that the costs sunk into collections and the facility will create long-run value for the partners
And the tools (mostly software) and services needed to realize those opportunities
“Discovery to Delivery” was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, and resulted in an extensive set of reports and recommendations that are published on our website. You’ll get that URL at the end of the slides. The project identified three major thematic areas for our next stage of development – shared collections, cooperative collection development, and long-term preservation commitments – and included substantial work to define the technology required to bring those thematic areas into real practice.

9. Obstacles to Sharing Three ILS installations, using different systems
Adding millions of records to each ILS is prohibitive
No common, pre-existing resource-sharing network
Different circulation policies and different patrons
Issues ReCAP faces locally, we all face globally
We hope that ReCAP will be a valuable case study on the way to regional and national shared collections programs
To achieve that, we have to overcome some obstacles. There is no common ILS or resource sharing system among the partners, naturally they have different circulation policies, and to some extent, this is because they have several different patron groups, between two distinctive private universities and a public research library.

10. North American print book resource: 45.7 million distinct publications
889.5 million total library holdings
OCLC Research, 2013

11. POLICY Solutions Reframe existing ReCAP collections:
Shared: Available to all partners and subject to a retention commitment and other agreed policies
Open: Available to all partners but not subject to a retention commitment or other Shared Collection policies
Restricted: Available only or primarily to the owning library (often special collections material)
New accessions to be Shared by default. Open or Restricted status must be specifically set.
Overcoming those barriers requires some policy decisions and some technology development. On the policy side, we are beginning to frame the existing and forthcoming holdins of ReCAP in three ways:
Shared: Available to all partners and subject to a retention commitment and other agreed policies
Open: Available to all partners but not subject to a retention commitment or other Shared Collection policies
Restricted: Available only or primarily to the owning library (often special collections material)
New accessions to be Shared by default. Open or Restricted status must be specifically set.

12. Code
Customer Name
Total items
Retr. FY14
Retrieval % CU
Columbia Standard (Columbia)
2,966,081
45,546
1.5% EV
East Asian Vernacular (Columbia)
335,950
4,440
1.3% GC
Government Documents (Columbia)
39,641
188
0.5% HS
Health Science Library (Columbia)
126,561
1,550
1.2% PA
Unrestricted (Princeton)
2,365,949
26,846
1.1% QK
Mendel Sound & Video (Princeton)
32,812
110
0.3% GP
Government Documents (Princeton)
34,200 48
0.1% NA
NYPL Standard
3,749,913
26,307
0.7%
TOTAL
9,651,107
105,035

13. Technology Solutions Middleware development process initiated
High-level architecture developed by HTC Global, Inc.
RfP for Final System development issued January 2015!
Connect three ILS for records discovery
Harvest metadata (OAI-PMH; ResourceShare) for Bib and Item records
Create a searchable index (Lucene/SOLR)
Connect to Inventory Management Systems
New SOAP API (IMS-API): Item Status & Queuing
Connect three ILS for circulation
Check-out to user and return to library (NCIP)
Recall Items (NCIP and IMS-API)