1. Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust (EAST)
Shared Print Initiative
Validation Study

2. The Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust

3. The EAST Collective Collection 16,573,071 4,749,042 50%
title holdings
16,573,071
title sets
4,749,042
title sets held by one library in the group
50%
2,359,033 title sets
title sets with > 10 aggregate uses
20%
939,819 title sets
title sets represented in HathiTrust
39%
1,865,115 title sets

4. The EAST Retention Model
Retain all holdings of scarcely held titles
Retain up to 5 holdings of frequently used titles
Retain one holding of every print title
Pre 2011, non gov doc, not tech/textbook
The EAST Retention model will result in EAST libraries’ committing to retain just over 6 million holdings.
The model itself, which was initially recommended by the Monograph Working Group and approved last week by the Executive Committee, has 3 major components:
The first focuses on retaining SCARECELY HELD holdings – as defined by looking at the holdings in WorldCat as well as comparator groups of non-EAST libraries in the Northeast
The second focused on retaining FREQUENTLY used holdings – based on the aggregate uses of the EAST libraries
And, the third focused on retaining one copy of everything else that meets the criteria of the model – which EXCLUDES recently published materials as well as certain materials categorized as ephemera.
6.1 Million / ~30%

5. EAST 6.1 Million?
Over 10 weeks Feb - April libraries 6000 books
availability metric - 1% MOE
OCLC/SCS generated lists - every nth title from random start
Google Sheet
Google App Script
This slide is really just to brag about the amount of work the EAST team and member libraries have accomplished over the last 9 months.
Matthew and I will talk more about the 3 major focuses for work this year:
The validation sample study
The collection analysis work, with incredible support from SCS, and resultant retention proposals to the EAST libraries
The policy work which will culminate in a formal – but lightweight we hope – Memorandum of Understanding for the EAST member libraries to execute by year’s end

6. Validation Sample Study #1

8. EAST Validation Dashboard

9. Result of VSS#1 97% of monographs accounted for
90% in average or excellent condition, 10% poor
Further data analysis in process
Items publisher pre-1900 are in poorer condition
Widely circulated items are slightly more likely to be unaccounted for
Largest vulnerability where single copy held at low availability library
(no security system for many years, mangled inventory process)
We now have high level results from the first validation sample study and they are impressive:
Some 97% of the items were accounted for – meaning either available on shelf as expected or checked out
Of these, 90% were determined to be in average or excellent condition.
We are working with our statistical consultant now to further analyze the data from VSS#1 and will be providing a more complete report over the summer and fall. We are also working with the consultant and the co-PI’s on the Mellon grant to develop a detailed methodology for our second validation sample study. We had originally expected to investigate further the impact of redundancy on retention – how many copies of a title should be kept across diverse local collections such as EAST to best ensure that a copy will be available. However, our initial data have so far indicated that this might not be a fruitful area of further research since based on the VSS#1 data, having multiple copies across the EAST libraries did not reduce or increase the availability metric.
You’ll see here a couple of additional data points that we may investigate further:
Much older materials are in significantly poorer condition than the average across EAST, which was 10%. Pre-1900 items were 45% more likely to be in poor condition.
And, items that had been widely circulated at an individual EAST member library were somewhat more likely to be missing [or at least unaccounted for] with a 4.3% likelihood of NOT being available vs. the 3% overall for EAST.
While neither of this is really surprising, we do believe we have quite a robust data set from the VSS#1 study and want to work with out consultant to analyze it as completely as possible with the grant funding we have in the hopes of further informing retention modeling in the future.

10. Insights from statistician
1 copy nothing we can do, retaining 2 of everything bumps up commitment to 45%, not acceptable to partners
“ Among monographs with greater than 10% likelihood of being missing, 19,493 of them are solely allocated for retention, a total of 9,721 of these solely allocated have another copy available in EAST. A possible modification to the current retention program would be to retain a second copy of these 9,721 titles.”

11. Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust
EASTLIBRARIES.ORG
To learn more about EAST visit eastlibraries.org