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OCLC Research has turned out a number of new reports that I’ve been catching up on reading over the last few days.

Taking Stock and Making Hay provides an overview of using collection assessment to guide resource allocation in archives. Probably most useful are the appendices, which identify and summarize several major assessment projects. I’ll be spending some time with these in more detail looking for tools and methods that we can adopt locally.

The introduction refers to statistics from a 1998 ARL survey of special collections, which found that most ARL members have significant backlogs of undescribed material.  Specifically, results there indicated that 15% of printed volumes, 27% of manuscripts, and 35% of audio-visual collections held by the 100 respondents were uncatalogued or unprocessed (depending on the type of material) at the time of the survey. Out of curiosity, I ran some quick numbers on Mac’s special collections books, and the result is (drumroll, please): we’re right there with everyone else. Currently we have just shy of 100,000 monograph items catalogued (98,522) and roughly 20,000 in our backlog. That’s a big number. We’ve made this a priority, including writing it into our strategic plan, but in years of tight budgets it becomes one of many priorities to be balanced.

A second interesting read was OhioLINK–OCLC Collection and Circulation Analysis Project 2011. It’s more an overview of how and why than detailed analysis (hopefully we can look forward to future publications as they analyze the data), but still a worthwhile read. OhioLINK spent several years working with OCLC Research on a consortium-wide study of circulation trends. This is an important distinction: the work is looking at item-level circulation data rather than simply the number of holdings or overlap across institutions. One of their key goals is using this data to help determine how many copies of books in various subject areas are truly needed across the consortium, freeing resources from buying duplicates for the purchase of more unique titles. The data, both collective and for each institution, is also available for study from the project webpage. It would be very nice (OCUL, are you listening?) to see the project replicated for other consortia. Aside from generating comparator data, it would be a useful step toward greater collaboration in our acquisition and management of print collections.

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