Make or Buy the Big Historical Collections?

Your friendly facilitators:

Ivy Anderson, CDL

Warren Holder, OCUL

Speakers

• Mark SandlerCommittee on Institutional Cooperation

• Ann OkersonNorthEast Research Library Consortium

• Barbara PreeceBoston Library Consortium

• Discussion

SYSTEMWIDE STRATEGIC DIRECTIONS FOR LIBRARIES AND SCHOLARLY INFORMATION AT

THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIAProgress Report 2005

• Participation in a large-scale international digital reformatting activity promises to extend collection breadth: UC will have free online access to materials that are not otherwise available locally while reducing expenditures on vendor products that are based on out-of-copyright and other public domain materials.

UC “Factors to Consider”When evaluating requests for systemwide licensing of new resources that include out-of-copyright

material, the following factors should be considered by each group involved at the various stages of evaluation:

• Whether an alternative open access version exists or is planned • Whether UC is actively pursuing or considering a digitization opportunity for the same material,

either alone or collaboratively (e.g. CDL-built content through OCA) • If a future open access version is anticipated, the value of access to content now vs. open

access at some point in the future.  Factors to consider might include, for example, the level or urgency of user demand and/or potential near-term cost savings through print deduplication and/or remote storage

• A careful appraisal of whether there is sufficient added value in the licensed version to justify the expenditure of scarce collection dollars when an alternative version exists.  Factors to critically evaluate in this light might include:

– The value derived from a relationship to other currently-licensed material (e.g. backfiles of currently-licensed journals where access may be integrated

– Aggregation of content under a single interface as opposed to independently-created digitized versions that lack coordinated access

– Indexing and presentation of content, or other added features that enhance the end user experience. Recognizing end users’ increasing preference for ‘single search box’ simplicity in accessing content, careful judgments should be made about whether an open access resource is adequate to satisfy the bulk of UC student and faculty needs

• The degree to which the licensed resource adheres to UC licensing and technical requirements.  Nonconformity that might be overlooked when alternatives are unavailable may be less acceptable in the face of open access.

UC Shared Collections in the Age of…

From Purchasing to Curation

Lewis, David W., “A Model for Academic Libraries 2005 to 2025”

Access Fees Software licensing, copyright and

legal issues

Storage / hosting costs

E-formatting and technology development

Search / browse technology

User interface enhancements & new features

24/7 access to the content

Bandwidth for faster searching

Authentication/LAD and usage reporting

Technical support / webmaster queries

• COST for ProQuest CSA

• VALUE for customers

Confidential Information – ProQuest CSA

John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera

• Partnership between Oxford University and ProQuest CSA using grant money from the JISC– JISC made funding available for projects that digitized collections

important for academic research. This included a funding requirement for an on-going model to sustain the digital collection in perpetuity

• JISC provided funding for the preservation, creation of meta-data and digitization

• Oxford provides the expertise to preserve and create the meta-data• ProQuest CSA provided the digitization services• ProQuest CSA assumes the costs for the creation of the interface,

search technology and the on-going hosting of the content• ProQuest CSA provides “free” access to the United Kingdom and

sells the content outside of the UK• Sales outside of the UK market support the on-going hosting of the

content and pays a royalty back to Oxford.Confidential Information – ProQuest CSA

Make or Buy?

• Mark SandlerCommittee on Institutional Cooperation

• Ann OkersonNorthEast Research Library Consortium

• Barbara PreeceBoston Library Consortium

• Discussion