Workshop on Retention and Preservation

Posted on March 27, 2012 by shirleycousins

The Workshop on Retention and Preservation on March 12th was a great success, bringing together 20 people from around the country to consider that subject in depth. The presentations and other related materials are now available on the Project website to support further discussion and a report with recommendations will be produced shortly.

At the start of the day, Michael Emly’s presentation set the issue of preservation and retention within the broader context of the Project and its objectives. He highlighted the hope of moving towards a more strategic approach to decision-making through the Copac Tools. If a framework can be provided which allows libraries to signal what material they intend to retain long-term, whether with respect to individual items or to whole collections, then other institutions will be able to use this data to inform their own decisions, and so best use can be made of scarce resources by avoiding unnecessary duplication of effort. Michael set out the practical agenda for the day’s discussions, but also spoke of the larger agenda which is to develop an agreed national strategy and framework which safeguards long-term access to materials for the scholarly community.

Mike Mertens picked up on this strategic perspective by looking at some similar efforts in the past, particularly through the RSLP and RIN initiatives. The need is broadly understood, the strategic requirements clear, and Mike challenged those present to make sure that the opportunity presented by the development of the Copac Tools translates into an effective national framework for preserving the National Research Collection. The funding environment is less favourable than in the previous decade, so this can only come about by coordinated action “from the bottom up”.

The workshop then took a very practical bent, looking at the information needed to sustain such a system, how it might be recorded locally and how it could be shared within the context of the Copac Tools. The desirability of including data not only about retention and conservation but also about digitisation and the availability of commercially available electronic copies came out very strongly. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was unanimity regarding the importance of a mechanism for identifying an institution’s intention to retain an item for the long term. But the willingness of those present to accept Mike’s challenge and engage with the wider strategic agenda also came across very strongly.

In preparation for the workshop delegates were provided with two documents:

Terminology for preservation and digitization actions. (PDF) Michael Emly, University of Leeds.
In safe hands? The challenges for RLUK to make preservation a collaborative work (PDF) Michael Emly, University of Leeds & Mike Mertens, RLUK.

A summary of the plenary session is available: CCM Retention & Preservation Workshop: Plenary notes

The Workshop presentations are also available, including feedback from the group discussions.

CCM Web interface

Posted on March 20, 2012 by shirleycousins

The CCM Web interface has been released to CCM partner and associate libraries; they are trialling the collection management tools in their current form, as well as considering their potential value in supporting a range of collection management tasks. Feedback from the initial testing will be incorporated into ongoing development to support further assessment through case studies, as well as use case development.

The CCM Web Interface has been developed through an iterative process in a collaboration between Copac and the project partner libraries. In the first CCM project a very basic user interface was created, as a proof of concept, to let the partners try out ideas and get a sense of what might be possible. This fed into use case development, which in turn helped guide interface development requirements. This UI was concerned with function rather than form and served its purpose, but needed the background knowledge of the participants to get the best out of it.

We have now turned the initial UI into something that is significantly more user friendly to support wider testing of the facilities. This new user interface is an adaptation of the Copac Beta test UI that was released for public testing in November 2011. By repurposing the Copac Beta UI the CCM project is benefitting from all the background user testing and development that has gone into the Copac UI, as well as giving the Copac development effort a wider impact.

The new CCM UI was released on Jan 27th for testing by project partners and there was a second release on 28th Feb ready for user testing by the new Associate libraries that have joined this phase of the project. As well as focussing on improved user friendliness we have also added some facilities; so at the moment the UI offers:

• live and batch search facilities, including library and region limit option;
• options to deduplicate result sets by ISBN or a range of other fields;
• Copac style record displays;
• pseudo-MARC export including collection information;
• result visualisation in various forms, including holdings map;
• data export for local use in collection analysis;

Whilst the current testing is underway we are reviewing and prioritising potential developments that have been identified by the partner libraries. Development will continue behind the scenes but we will keep the UI stable during the initial testing by the Associate libraries. Once this first stage of testing is complete we will bring on board development requests arising from their work for a new release of the UI.

3 associate libraries join the Project team

Posted on March 6, 2012 by michaelemly

We are very pleased to welcome to the Project the libraries of the V&A, UCL and the University of Warwick as associate libraries who will contribute to the development and testing of the Copac collection management tools.

The participation of the associate libraries will allow for the exploration of a wider range of scenarios, and from a number of different perspectives. Planning is already in hand for work on:

How well the tools can support work with foreign publications, especially those in non-Roman scripts
Identification of the time savings that can be achieved in stock editing through use of the tools
Developing our understanding of similarities and differentiating characteristics across similar collections in different libraries
Exploring what might constitute a “match” against Copac in different contexts.

Testing of a beta version of the tools with a revised interface and added functionality is already under way, and the next 3 months will see an intensive period of further development.

And coming soon – information about forthcoming discussions around using Copac to share information about retention and preservation in order to assist prioritisation and decision-making across the community.

Our first blog post and feedback from December’s workshop

Posted on January 20, 2012 by joypalmer

We’re really pleased to launch our blog with this first official post for the Copac Collections Management project. Though we’ve been working steadily in this area for nearly a year now, we’ve done so, I’ll admit, slightly under the radar. As we commence our second phase of development activity, it’s clear to us that we need to start more openly sharing our progress and lessons learned. Collections management, the freeing up of library space and at the same time the preservation of unique or rare items of importance to UK researchers are key strategic issues facing many libraries today; so we know our work is of real interest to the broader community.

If you would like to learn more about this project, we invite you to explore this site, where you can find more detailed information about our proposed approach, read our reports on work so far, and the use cases we’re testing the tools against. Between now and July 2012, this blog will be updated at least monthly with information on our progress so far. We’ll also be inviting you to give us feedback on approaches we’re taking.

The December Workshop

Though our blog is new, we have been actively engaging the community through other means. Before the Christmas break, we invited contributors to Copac to attend a workshop in Leeds. The response to our invitation was overwhelmingly positive, and on December 5^th over thirty attendees joined us in Leeds. This gave us an opportunity to discuss the project with the wider community, looking at broad collection management issues and gaining input into the direction for the continued development of the support tools and related work. It also helped us to identify libraries we could recruit to help us with the next phase of our work – i.e. testing the tools within their own institutional contexts and providing feedback.

It was certainly an energising day. Our colleagues gave presentations on the project and their uses of the tool, and throughout our discussions the overall reaction from the participants was very positive, with an appreciation of the benefits that the collection management tools could offer, as well as a general discussion of problem areas.

Broadly speaking, participants could immediately see the potential of the tools; but in our group discussions some interesting themes and questions emerged:

The standard of cataloguing was raised, and the question of what the national libraries are doing about long term retention.
There were concerns about pre-1800 material. This may need a lot of detailed information in a record to make retention decisions. etc.
It was clear that non-catalogued materials need to be addressed; i.e. do we invest time money and effort in cataloguing this material? There was agreement that the tool could be very useful in support this
The tools could inform preservation decisions e.g. damaged items.
We should consider providing regional or consortia views on the data
Concerns were raised over the reliability and currency of records within Copac. Also, the quality of data in an institution’s own catalogue. In general, issues of trusting the data were raised – if results indicate ‘last copy’ how do we test validity of this?
It was felt that the provision of guidelines and working principals for using the tools to provide the statistics and data that will inform productive dialogue with senior managers.
The role of ebooks was also raised. Will they count as a trusted copy? In addition, could the tool help inform ebook deals and negotiations?
It was suggested that the tools could be used to understand a collection in the context of the wider national collections, and that it might have a role to play as an international comparator tool – which may be useful for attracting international students.
By highlighting subject collection strengths we might be able to encourage new researchers.

In addition, throughout the day broader strategic questions were raised over whether there should there be a national agreement to cover the transfer of unwanted material to other institutions, and also the need for a national agreement for retention decisions e.g. minimum number of copies. The role of the Legal Deposit libraries was also discussed, and it was clear that Legal Deposit libraries are facing the same space pressures as other libraries, and so looking seriously at rationalising their own collections and revisiting the criteria for ‘permanent’ retention.

As move forward, our energies now switch to refining the user interface for the tool, and determining which libraries we would like to work with us in this next phase of testing. We look forward to letting you know our progress.