Thanks, for confirming my math! I'm in charge of the Kent State project, and my numbers come out to about 600 pieces per day. That does sound a little wild at first, and for now I'm setting it as a goal. But, it's not too crazy when you know our local context, and we hope not to have to resort to ruthlessness. We are adding staff to help with the project, and plan to spend substantially more on student help as well.
Some particulars:
1. At Kent we have essentially been in the fill-the-tower-and-never-weed-a-thing mode for 100 years. Our building is a 12 story tower. We've only started a few weeding projects over the past several years.
2. We have very high counts of high-copy-count mono duplicates. Example: 23 copies of "intro to econ" text from 1961. We feel comfortable shipping 20 of those 23 copies to Better World Books with no scholarly review.
3. We have an exceptional Electronic Journal Center (EJC) at OhioLINK, our consortium, with 12,000 journal titles online. In January 2011 we will add 4 million articles from thousands of journals in the Elsevier journal backfile to the EJC. While we have been cancelling paper versions of EJC titles for 10 years, we have NOT been removing the paper from the tower. We have designed decision processes to move the paper to the recycle bin, the depository, or elsewhere based on state-wide principles of weeding/retention.
4. We have the complete JSTOR collections online. Ditto our retention of the paper versions.
5. We have endless classified serials in the tower ...endless runs of annuals, handbooks, manuals...e.g....a zillion years of every piece of Moody's Industrial Manual, and the Annual Handbook of Baloney, since the beginning of time. Again, we have things like Moody's online and have not weeded any of this paper. Librarians are working on title-by-title retention worksheets with faculty on these titles.
6. We have 5 shared state-wide depositories that are moving onto a single local ILS system and are starting state-wide de-duping of paper -- classified serials, periodicals, and monos. This deduping will result in the retention in storage of at least 2 copies of every serial/periodical -- one that circulates and one that doesn't. We are setting up more efficient service-center type processing at these storage facilities, implementing a shared Illiad system, and intend to share and deliver materials from the depositories to all OhioLINK member libraries more effectively than we do now. Presently we have statewide second day delivery for hard copy but rely on a combination of request/delivery technologies for scanned materials.
7. Kent does have a half-million items in the depository, but most of these have never been de-duped.
8. None of the parts of the weeding project yet call for individual book review. When this happens, in a year or two, we will involve faculty, and this part of the project will be slow.
The media releases on our project have mentioned things like "half the books...etc...etc..." They would have been correct if they would have said "half the paper." And most of this paper is made up of periodicals that are online with as much permanence as we can expect; classified serials which are online/in storage elsewhere/ and/or obsolete; and monos that are painfully duplicative.
In sum, we have a set of circumstances that should allow us to come close to our goal without being ruthless. Indeed, I keep using the phrase "weed responsibly" in every meeting about this project.
Best regards,
Tom Klingler
Assistant Dean
University Libraries
Library Room 383
Kent State University
Kent, Ohio 44242-0001
tk_at_kent.edu
330-672-1646
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Weinheimer Jim
Sent: Friday, October 01, 2010 4:50 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] CSU library finds 40% of collection hasn't circulated
Dan Matei wrote:
<snip>
Say, 200 working days/year. That is 725 volumes/working day.
Say, 8 working hours/day. That is about 90 volumes/hour, that is about 1,5 volumes per minute.
Imagine a list of volumes to move, sorted by shelf numbers, at hand. In these conditions, I would
say a person could handle on the average (not 1,5/minute, but) 1 volume/minute. That is 96,000
volumes. Say, roughly, 100,000 volumes a year.
</snip>
I guess I wasn't clear in my meaning. At the technical level of simply moving materials from one place to another, it can certainly be done to actually move the volumes with enough staff. But to make a separate decision on each volume--to consider it in relation to other books available, plus getting a agreement with faculty(!) is impossible to achieve.
But once the decision has been made to move x number of books from here to there, it can be figured out and achieved, as you point out.
James Weinheimer j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
via Pietro Roselli, 4
00153 Rome, Italy
voice- 011 39 06 58330919 ext. 258
fax-011 39 06 58330992
First Thus: http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
Cooperative Cataloging Rules: http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/
Received on Wed Oct 06 2010 - 23:56:20 EDT