Yale University Library
Preservation Department
MEMORANDUM |
November 10, 1998 |
FROM: Paul Conway SUBJECT: Preservation "Not On Shelf" Study TO: Collection Development Council As part of the NEH-sponsored British History Preservation Project, the Preservation Department studied the extent to which titles identified in Orbis for possible preservation on microfilm are not on the shelf when needed and the cost of addressing the collection management issues raised by missing titles. These issues may be of continuing interest to the Collection Development Council because the study could be seen as a predictor of the consequences for service to readers of the library's retrospective conversion program, which when finished will have added 1,500,000 titles from the official catalog to Orbis. This memo describes the methodology of the study, outlines the findings, and suggests some policy issues for your consideration. It concludes with two recommendations for possible further action.
MethodologyThe target collection for the study was the general circulating collection of the Sterling Memorial Library, specifically the "Old Yale" class By-Bz, containing volumes documenting the history of the British Isles. Catalog cards for the entire segment of the By-Bz sub-class (ca. 13,500 titles) were converted to machine readable form by OCLC in 1995 at the beginning of the British History project. The starting point for the study was the work forms for 2,690 titles processed for preservation microfilming. This subset of the overall project included only titles identified as likely to be in scope because of date of imprint (1800 to 1950). The subset does not include materials published before or after the scope dates that may or may not have been on the shelf. In other words, the project did not begin with a comprehensive reading of the shelf by comparing shelf list records with the collection in the stacks. Of this sample of target titles, 416 titles (15.5%) were excluded from the study because bibliographic searching in RLIN and OCLC revealed the existence of preservation microfilm of the titles produced by other preservation departments or commercial firms. The study assumed (possibly incorrectly) that missing titles from the Yale collection already preserved on microfilm could be obtained by contacting the owner of the master negative noted in the national bibliographic utilities.
Of the remaining group of 2,274 titles, we were able to locate on the shelf all but 205 titles. This subset formed the core of the study. For each title, a student intern working in the department carefully checked Orbis for clues to its whereabouts, searched RLIN and OCLC for duplicate copies held by other research libraries, and consulted the public and official card catalogs for additional copies in the library system. Where necessary and appropriate, the intern also browsed shelves, searched book trucks in the stacks, explored the processing rooms of the Circulation and Preservation Departments, and consulted with library staff who specialize in locating missing books. Every reasonable effort was made to locate each title in the target subset.
Findings
Overall, the 205 missing titles represent 6.9 percent of the target collection. On the surface, this is a relatively large proportion of a heavily used collection. Closer inspection reduces the proportion of the target collection that is actually missing to 2.6 percent.
Fully sixty-two percent of the titles originally thought to be missing turned up in the Yale library system after extensive searching.
- Twenty-seven percent of the titles were missing because of active circulation. Eighteen titles were charged to patrons and an additional 38 titles had circulated within the six months prior to the study and were assumed to be floating around the building someplace.
- At least eighteen percent of the titles were missing because of renovation-related collection management actions. Sixteen titles were in the Preservation Department's processing backlog with marginally meaningful provisional circulation records. When the intern compared the full bibliographic record in Orbis, the provisional circulation record, and the book in hand, these items matched. Ten titles were in the temporary "No Room Sections" of the stacks that were established to hold materials displaced because of the stack tower renovation. Due to their artifactual value, twelve titles were located in a restricted cage area of the Seeley G. Mudd Library (again with unlinked provisional records).
- Another fourteen percent of the missing titles were associated with retrospective conversion. Twenty-nine titles turned out to be bound with other titles listed in the catalog. The retrospec-tive conversion of the shelf list was not capable of detecting this particular variation of publication; items were located by consulting the library's official card catalog, which is organized by main entry. Included in this last category are pamphlets clustered in boxes on the shelf for which retrospective conversion generated a single record or an incomplete record.
- A final two percent of the missing titles are preservation peculiarities. Five titles were set aside after they were located in the building because they were out of scope for the preservation project: one off-print; one modern reprint; one massively incomplete volume; and two modern photocopy reproductions. The bibliographic record created in the retrospective conversion process did not contain this Yale-specific information.
Removing from the study out of scope titles as well as titles ultimately located through various detective strategies left a balance of 77 titles, representing almost thirty-eight percent of group of missing titles. Of this group, 62 titles are owned by at least one library that contributes biblio-graphic records to either RLIN or OCLC. An additional ten titles are duplicated by the holdings of other Yale library units. Five titles are missing from the shelves - not able to be located at Yale - and are not represented by records in RLIN or OCLC. These five missing volumes are evidently unique to Yale and may not be replaceable.
The attached spreadsheet takes the distribution of the titles that were found in various locations or not found at all and projects the findings of the study first to the entire British History segment in SML (By-Bz) and the to the entire population of card records yet to be converted from the library's Official Catalog. It is probably an easy stretch to accept the projection to By-Bz; it is another matter to accept unquestioned the projection to the ongoing retrospective conversion program. Recall, however, that when OCLC processes the Official Catalog, they will skip cards that have already been converted (including Beinecke, CCL, Divinity, Medical, Music, Art, and various small projects). The lion's share of newly converted titles reside in the Sterling and Mudd libraries.
Implications for Collection Management
Given its documented value and known heavy use, the physical integrity of the British History collection in Sterling is largely intact. This is very good news. If the integrity of the British History collection mirrors the completeness of other large historical collections in the Sterling and Mudd stacks, then the overall replacement problem may not be as serious as feared before the study concluded. That being said, there remain a number of challenges.
- Collection Management: The amount of energy that must be put into locating misplaced or in-process materials, in order to remove them from the list of missing titles, is very high. Deferred collection maintenance and the unusual disruptions of the renovation of the Sterling stack tower have taken their toll on the library's collections shelved there. Fully four percent of the three million titles located in Sterling (120,000) may now reside in places where they do not belong and where they are out of easy reach by readers. It could be argued that in the coming months and years many of the problems associated with the renovation will resolve themselves through persistent collection management in the stacks.
- Replacement: The vast majority (80.5%) of the subset of titles that appears to be genuinely lost from the British History collection may be replaceable by obtaining and then reproducing duplicate copies from RLG or OCLC member libraries. An additional 13 percent of the truly lost titles may be replaceable by reproducing duplicate copies held in other Yale libraries. The total number of irreplaceable titles (5) is so low as to be of only minimal concern for the sample studied. If the sample is representative of the overall scope of the collection that is about to undergo retrospective conversion (1,500,000 titles), then the missing book problem takes on new meaning. A lost rate of 0.2 percent translates into 2,534 irreplaceable titles lost from the collections for which bibliographic records will be in Orbis when retrospective conversion is complete.
- Cost: For the nearly 3,000 titles in the survey, the cost of replacing the lost books in the sample is a modest $6,800. The assumption of $100.00 to replace a title that must be borrowed and reproduced on either microfilm or paper may prove to be low when all processing costs are included. Again, if the NOS study is representative of the overall replacement challenge in the Sterling and Mudd Stacks, then the budgetary implications loom large. Replacing fully 2.4 percent of the 1.5 million titles in the yet-to-be-converted collection at an average cost of $94. 44 (borrowed and Yale duplicate) will require an investment of just over $3.4 million.
Discussion and Recommendations
If it turns out that some 39,020 newly-reconned titles are not on the library shelves when they should be, we are not yet in a crisis state - large as this number is. The actual identification of missing titles will most likely take place in one of four ways (arranged in descending order of likelihood): LSF transfers, reader requests, preservation microfilming projects, and systematic shelf reading. One could argue that the library, accordingly, needs four separate strategies for dealing with the evolving collection management challenges posed by missing titles. Each of the avenues for discovering a missing titles carries with it a separate service mandate.
The above discussion suggests two recommendations.
- Clarify the library's overall replacement policies, with particular attention paid to the four separate streams of discovery. Statements of replacement priority and methodology should be developed for each stream.
- Identify and protect a specific budgetary line item for replacing titles based on the priorities identified in the replacement policy. The budget must provide for the cost of borrowing replacement copies from research libraries for purposes of copying on paper, film, or digital as appropriate. The budget must also allow for replacement services to be provided by research libraries in lieu of interlibrary loan.
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