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WEST Assessment Webinar summary

March 6, 2020 Author: Anna StrikerCategories:

The WEST project team hosted three webinars presenting brief program updates, an overview of findings from the 2019 WEST Assessment, and the outcomes of the strategic planning session held in October 2019. Slide deck is now available through the California Digital Library website. Webinar participants represented a well-rounded cross-section of member institutions and staff roles. Three general themes emerged during the Q&A portions of the webinars

  • Regional vs national priorities: Several questions arose around the interplay of regional and national priorities. One of these questions focused on the relative priority of those efforts and the ways in which WEST can maintain the distinct regional identity of the program while also contributing to and benefiting from the national shared print community. Program staff noted that assessment results point to a definite interest in leveraging a national network, but also to a continued interest in maintaining regional autonomy and priorities. The particular value of WEST’s engagement in a federated alliance of programs like the Rosemont Alliance is that we can maintain a strong set of regional goals while situating the work we do in a national context that we are actively helping to define.
  • CDL/CRL/HathiTrust collaboration: Attendees were also interested in the burgeoning partnership between the California Digital Library (WEST’s administrative host), the Center for Research Libraries, and HathiTrust to develop a broadly-applicable infrastructure to support collaborative efforts, analysis, and decision-making for the wider shared print community. WEST has and will continue to be a key player in this new vision for the future of shared print management and integration.
  • Possible expansion of WEST’s scope: As WEST comes close to finishing archiving of Bronze materials, there is an opportunity to review whether WEST should expand the scope of its collections in order to remain agile in its support of members needs and priorities. Participants commented on the benefits of broad and interconnected collections to support access by diverse groups of institutions, but also noted that WEST should remain mindful of activities in other shared print programs in order to minimize redundancy and duplication of effort, and to maintain our distinct identify as we work to adopt the strategic directions and recommendations made by the WEST governance groups.

In order to achieve the strategic recommendations made by the WEST governance committees, the WEST project team is soliciting expressions of interest for the following working groups that will be convened in the coming weeks:

  • Working Group for WEST Resource Sharing
  • Working Group for Disclosure and Validation Standards
  • Working Group to Investigate Non-journal Formats
  • Advisory Group for Program Cost-share Model

These groups will be asked to review and either produce updated documentation or make specific recommendations for how WEST should proceed in these areas. Full charges and estimated time commitments for the Disclosure and Validation Standards Working Group as well as the Resource Sharing Working Group are now available, and anyone interested in serving as a full member or as a consultant on either group is encouraged to submit an expression of interest. A visualization of all WEST committees and working groups and their relationships can be found on the WEST website. Please email Anna Striker (anna.striker@ucop.edu) with any questions about the 2020 WEST working groups.

The full 2019 WEST Assessment report and the outcomes of the 2019 WEST Strategic Planning session are available on the WEST website. Additionally, two addenda are available that supplement the WEST Assessment Report: What’s Left to Archive, an analysis of the remaining unarchived journals across the WEST member institutions, and a Deselection Study that analyzes WEST reported deselection activities from Cycles 2-7.