Rosemont Shared Print Alliance update

In 2015 and 2016 WEST began engaging in conversations with other regional shared print programs across the country to explore ways we could collaborate on various issues impacting shared print. From these conversations the Rosemont Shared Print Alliance was born, an organization that facilitates information sharing, leveraging the experience and commitment found in each of these programs to create a robust network that is dedicated to supporting and promoting shared print in the wider community.

What is Rosemont, and how did it start?

• • The Rosemont Shared Print Alliance is a national federation of regional shared print programs from across the USA. As a federated program, the member programs maintain a large degree of autonomy and control over local processes and policies. Rosemont is more of a coordinating body than a governing body, though there are some initiatives in the works that align partner programs’ policies and procedures for some activities.
  • Conversations around creating a national shared print consortium began in 2015 as a result of feedback received in the 2014 WEST member survey that member library directors would like to see more collaboration with other state and regional shared print programs (this sentiment was reiterated in the 2016 member survey). Rosemont is the product of those conversations, and is a concrete step toward increased national communication and collaboration between shared print programs.
  • See this webinar from 2017 hosted by Emily Stambaugh (former WEST Program Manager) for more background information: https://vimeo.com/326452205

Who participates in Rosemont and how is it governed?

• The founding programs are Big Ten Academic Alliance Shared Print Repository (CICBTAA-SPR, often shortened to BTAA), Florida Academic Libraries Repository (FLARE), Scholars Trust (a partnership between the Association for Southeastern Research Libraries [ASERL] and the Washington Research Library Consortium [WRLC]), and the Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST); the Eastern Academic Scholar’s Trust (EAST) joined in March 2018. In total, 182 libraries participate in Rosemont through their local shared print programs.
  • Future directions: Rosemont is also committed to engaging with other programs that share our vision and mission. We are involved in conversations with established and emerging national shared print organizations to find areas of commonality and possible collaborations.
• An Executive Committee and Operations Committee oversee Rosemont activities and are responsible for guiding collective efforts among regions, consortia and member libraries and with other organizations to develop shared print journal collection in the US. The Executive Committee is made up of representatives from member institutions, and the Operations Committee is composed of participating program staff.

What has Rosemont been doing?

• Common access principles: These principles state that Rosemont participating institutions agree to make their archived materials available to other Rosemont member institutions via resource sharing (electronic document delivery, non-returnable photocopies, or returnable loans of the full volume).
  • Future directions: The Rosemont Operations Committee is investigating how to make Rosemont retentions more visible for resource sharing purposes, such as creating a Rosemont-specific GAC or a pod in RapidILL.
• New Titles: In the interest of growing the collective collection, we’ve set a goal of archiving an additional 100,000 titles in our collective collections by the end of the current Road Map timeframe. Each program is tasked with drafting a plan for its contributions, though this is to some degree dependent on a shared decision support system (more on this below).
• 3 copies: Shared print programs focus a lot on discussions about creating efficiencies by archiving a single shared copy that member institutions can deselect against, but Rosemont is also concerned with ensuring appropriate redundancy of the print record. We’ve set a target to archive three copies of each journal across Rosemont, which will act as insurance against any potential disaster at one of the archiving institutions.
• Decision Support System (DSS) Tools: Currently there is not a convenient way for all partner programs and their member institutions to coordinate their archiving efforts across Rosemont. It’s one of Rosemont’s primary goals to establish a shared system for collection analysis, which would facilitate:
  • identifying titles eligible for retention & securing those commitments from member institutions,
  • reaching the 3 copy goal for each title,
  • identifying last or scarce copies, and
  • providing reports to members regarding collection comparison, needs & offers for gap filling, exposing retention commitments to the wider community, and tracking collection growth.

Potential future directions for DSS tool development are discussed below.

• Last Copy Principles & Guidelines: Rosemont is developing Guidelines to ensure that last and scarce copies of journals are retained for the collective. Our vision for this is to create a mechanism for identifying these items so the owning libraries can retain them within their local programs (and thus for Rosemont) as well as a mechanism for the owning library to transfer the item to another Rosemont institution or storage facility if the owning library and its local program are not able to retain it. This is still in the works, but there have been conversations recently between Rosemont member program staff and local library representatives about what the Guidelines should include and how this process might work at a local operational level as well as at the program level.
  • Future directions: The last copy guidelines as they are currently being developed are intended to help libraries make decisions about what to do with scarce titles as they come across them, but going forward we are hoping to make this a more proactive project. This would involve analyzing the collective collections to identify scarce titles and reaching out to the owning institutions to gain commitments to either retain the title or to transfer it to another institution that is able to retain it if the owning institution is not.

How does this impact WEST?

• Decision Support Service: One of the collection analysis tools that Rosemont is reviewing is, of course, AGUA. WEST has spent a considerable amount of time and attention to developing a robust DSS tool and workflow for analyzing collections, making allocation decisions, and disclosing retentions, which are many of the things we want a Rosemont-focused tool to be able to do. Regardless of what tool or system Rosemont adopts for collection analysis, there is deep knowledge and experience surrounding development of this type of tool in WEST that will be invaluable to Rosemont as we move forward on this project.
• Coordinated archiving efforts: As shared policies are developed for retention disclosure, identifying last/scarce copies, and resource sharing, and with the possibility of a shared DSS tool on the horizon, the viability of coordinating archiving activities with Rosemont partner programs grows. This is by no means a policy, but rather an opportunity to make strategic archiving decisions in a national context.
• Input on future directions: Rosemont has asked for member institution input on several initiatives this year, and will continue to do so going forward to ensure that we are supporting the people and the institutions doing the archiving work in the best way possible and are crafting guidelines and policies that are clear, sensible, and sustainable.
• WEST representation in Rosemont: Members of the WEST Executive Committee serve on the Rosemont Executive Committee, while WEST program staff sit on the Rosemont Operations Committee. In 2020, WEST will be chairing the Operations Committee, giving us the opportunity to lead the conversation on issues that impact shared print nationally.