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Operations Committee Meeting

December 16, 2020

EAST Updates

https://eastlibraries.org/news-events/2020-east-member-meeting

OC Topics

OC Elections - Terms expiring at the end of the year - status
NYU Non inventoried materials
UMI Reprints
State & Quasi Governmental docs
Ephemera Lists in GG
Other Lists from GG as it expires for C1/C2

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Ballot is out, closing Dec 21, 2020

EC and OC Elections happening now, deadline Monday at 5pm

Thank you to Richard Bleiler, Berry Chamness, Ray Schmidt, and Gwen Verkuilen-Chevalier for your service!

New OC members will come on board for the first meeting of 2021 in March.

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NYU Validation of Retentions

Validated 96.5% of 760k titles

~35k unvalidated titles too costly to pull from offsite storage

Many metadata errors due to RLIN records matching wrong OCLC Number

Prefer to keep commitments ONLY on what they have validated.

NYU approached us with this question as they are wrapping up a large inventory and validation project, where they have validated over 700,000 of their retained titles, including fixing metadata errors. Over half of their titles originally submitted to GreenGlass were assigned an OCLC number by SCS (1.4 million).

They are now at a point where they need to wrap up the project, and there are ~35k titles that they won’t be able to validate as they are offsite and it would be too costly in terms of time and $ to validate. They are concerned that based on their previous work, many of these may be on wrong format or just plain wrong records. They have found many metadata errors due to SCS matching problems with the RLIN records. Often there was either not enough metadata for a good match or discrepancies in particular important fields in the record that affected the match.

They are self registering their retentions with OCLC, and would prefer to only register and keep retentions on materials that they feel confident that they have.

They asked us if the could remove the retentions for the unvalidated titles. It is not that they are getting rid of them, just that they are not sure they have them.

While we were inclined to say yes, remove the retention, and kudos for the large scale validation, given that it is 35k titles we thought it should be discussed here first.

===========================================================================================================================

we'd probably find poor records, too little metadata, mismatched formats/language/edition, etc. that may not easily be categorized

=======================================================

⅓ wrong format

¼ don’t have

moved to preservation/fragile

many metadata errors (RLIN records matched to wrong OCLC number)

Materials are offsite - too expensive/time consuming to validate

Conservative answer: remove retention

OR

Keep retention knowing item may not be there.

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UMI Reprints

UMI reprints from microtexts
mis-cataloged as older editions rather than reprints, and thus appeared and scarce
2-3 dozen received EAST retention commitments
cheap paper with folds uncut

This scenario not in our FAQ. Have accepted reprints in the past.

These next two questions are from Richard, who rightly noted two types of materials not addressed in our current FAQ that they have come across at UConn. First is UMI reprints. They have found many of these that were miscataloged as the older edition rather than the reprint, and thus appeared scarce. A few dozen of these received EAST retentions. To quote Richard, “there is nothing desirable about these reprints”. We have on occasion in the past asked libraries to keep reprints when they represent something that is rare in the original.

The question is, should we allow them to remove the retention commitment and update our FAQ to say something about this type of material?

Richard do you have anything to add?

What should the FAQ say?

This seems to be a different scenario as they are not rare.

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“UMI reprints. Before the advent of networked information, the University Microfilms company would, upon request, photocopy the old and desirable monographs from their microtexts and send the physical format. In the UConn Library, these volumes were often mis-catalogued as these older editions rather than as reprints or facsimiles and thus, due to their relative scarcity, these reprints were listed among the collective monographic collections to be maintained by the UConn Library. There is nothing desirable about these reprints: they are printed on cheap paper with the signature folds uncut. My own belief is that these are simply photocopies of microformats, and the EAST monographs collections retention policy is explicit that photocopies are not included in the collective collections database. At the same time, this is but my belief! -- how would you recommend us to proceed with these?”

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State Docs

State Government Publications with EAST retentions (cataloged as monographs)

Fed docs are out of scope, but we haven’t explicitly addressed state docs

Dozens (if not hundreds or even more) have become EAST retention titles

This may also be the case at other libraries

The second question from Richard is perhaps a bit more complicated. They have discovered many state documents that have EAST retentions. This happened particularly when an individual volume of a series was cataloged separately.

EAST explicitly excluded Government publications, and SCS flagged these using the 074 (gpo item number) and 086 (gov doc number). We suspect that UConn is not alone in having retentions on a fair number of state docs.

How should EAST view state docs? Are they automatically out of scope?

Should we update our guidelines to allow removal of retentions on state docs?

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State government publications and quasi-state government publications. During the course of the collections review, we encountered publications by state governments that had been noted for EAST monographs collections retention. Furthermore, we discovered that the UConn Library had separately catalogued a number of the publications of state agricultural experiment stations – which in this state are treated as a quasi-governmental organization – and that these too have been noted for EAST monographs collections retention. I know that Federal Documents are not included in the EAST monographs retention, but would you be able to inform me of the EAST policies concerning these state and quasi-state documents, particularly when individual volumes of a series have been selected for retention?

There are literally thousands of these in the UConn Library and that dozens (if not hundreds or even more) have become EAST retention titles. It appears that whenever one of the various series was separately catalogued by the UConn Library, it was identified as a unique title. I suspect (without anything more than the above as anecdotal evidence) that this situation is not unique to the UConn Library.

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Retained Ephemera

Added with the Florida Libraries:

Addison-Wesley

Addison Wesley (added with 2020 Flex libraries - URI, Lehigh, USMAI)

Addison Wesley

Adobe Press / Adobe Systems

Prentice Hall (previous cohorts had “Prentice-Hall”, but not “Prentice Hall”

Re-applying Ephemera as part of URI collection analysis means some C1/C2 libraries now have “retained ephemera”

Ranges from 1%-5%, overall 2.2% of retained titles (~665k titles).

The Project Team reviews the “ephemera” list with all new cohorts and members, and also in reviewing withdraw request. In that process we’ve come across a few interesting omissions due to hyphenation discrepancies with Addison Wesley and Prentice Hall. We’ve asked SCS to now use both variations of the names. Also in reviewing the Lehigh University “Unique” titles list, Adobe Press and Adobe Systems stood out as publishers we should exclude.

OCLC has now included these in the EAST ephemera list, and reindexed the EAST collection as URI data was added.

This has resulted in quite a large number of retained titles now being marked as Ephemera. All C1/C2 libraries have at least a handful, and some up to a high of 5% at the USCGA and UMass Lowell.

Not sure really what to do with this. We want to get these lists from GreenGlass before it expires, but with registration in mid stream at the moment it seems like the wrong time to talk about this. We would appreciate your thoughts.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zr6c9cTzRxeiOqOkCEVJrrRMSd280ZQtXHQG53D1gco/edit#gid=1611886235

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GreenGlass Lists for Digitization Candidates

Pre 1926 (or 1930) titles retained but not in HathiTrust

Retained but not at my library (surplus copies)

Pre 1964 by Academic Press (not sure how to get at that)

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Quick Registration Update

CRL/OCLC have run into an issue with Serials that already have LHRs and a ‘do not merge’ set in the collection profile.

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Member Meeting Feedback?

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Scheduling 2021 Meetings

Quarterly, 3rd Wednesday of the Month, 11 a.m. - noon

March 17, June 16, September 15, December 15

Meeting Invite from Mei

*** PAN FORUM JANUARY 22, 2021, 12 - 2 Eastern ***

https://www.crl.edu/events/pan-ala-midwinter-2021-online