Re: impact of off-site storage?

Dear Jane,


Harvard has approximately half of its collections stored off-site (in Southborough, MA and Princeton, NJ)—over 11 million items. Turn-around time is over-night, including from Princeton (ReCAP). Our catalog lists both locations simply as “Storage” as the delivery time is the same.

The largest footprint in storage is for Widener Library, which serves humanities and social sciences. Because the turn-around time is so good, students and faculty are very comfortable requesting items. We also offer a “scan and deliver” service (I think that we did this by setting up an internal Rapid pod) that will deliver articles from storage or portions of books. We also make sure that we include HathiTrust records in our discovery layer, to ensure instant access to digital copies.

Because we have had items in storage for so many years, our community sees it as normal. It doesn’t stop folks from asking for a whole boat load of books, and it also means that, since they are used to having things delivered, students and faculty are happy to use BorrowDirect and ILL for materials that we don’t own. They know that we will get whatever they need, so they aren’t exercised that it’s not on a shelf on campus or that it might belong to another institution. This enables us to collect collectively with strategic partners, especially MIT, ReCAP, and Ivy Plus.

I realize that some may fear that having items in storage will discourage students from using library materials. All I can offer as evidence of the opposite is this: you may recall that in May 2017, there was a flurry of messages between the ARL library directors about what percentage of undergraduate students checked books out of the library, and half of them got stats from their Circ. Departments and shared the numbers (which, of course, only tells you about what was going on that one day). 72% of Harvard undergrads had books checked out. I can tell you that there’s no way that these were all from campus locations.

Storage with good service works.

Best regards,
Eliz

Elizabeth E. Kirk
Associate University Librarian for
                Scholarly Resources
Harvard University
1 Harvard Yard
Widener Library, Suite 110
Cambridge, MA 02138
tel: (617) 496-9781
library.harvard.edu


From: <colldv-request_at_lists.ala.org> on behalf of Jane Marie Pinzino <colldv_at_lists.ala.org>
Reply-To: Jane Marie Pinzino <jmpinzino_at_gmail.com>
Date: Wednesday, January 30, 2019 at 5:59 PM
To: "colldv_at_lists.ala.org" <colldv_at_lists.ala.org>
Subject: [ALCTS-colldv] impact of off-site storage?


Greetings colleagues,



Here at Tulane we continue to move print materials from the main library into off-site storage, as most if not all research libraries are obliged to do.



  *   I am wondering how research and researchers at your institution, particularly for the Humanities, are impacted by the physical distancing of print materials, particularly monographs.
  *   What is the turnaround time for obtaining an off-site item?
  *   Do scholars indeed receive what they need "just in time" to support their research process?
  *   Do scholars tend not to request an item because it is too much trouble, or the turnaround time is too long?

Thank you,

Jane M. Pinzino
Coordinator for Scholarly Resources for the Humanities
Howard-Tilton Memorial Library
Tulane University
7001 Freret St.
New Orleans, LA  70118