Cycles 8/9 Collections Analysis Underway – Initial Findings and Summary Reports Available for Download
WEST completed its last full collection analysis in 2016 when, for the first time, WEST Archive Holders and Builders made commitments for two years of archiving work. Now, as WEST nears the end of the second year of that work, another round of collections analysis to identify retention commitments for Cycles 8 and 9 (2018-2020) is underway.
In the fall, 59 WEST members submitted unarchived holdings files for 65 different OCLC symbols totaling some 1.9 million records.
The WEST model is based on compiling journal families (sets of related, preceding, and succeeding titles) and the crucial match-point for that purpose is ISSN. The more records WEST can match to a journal family via ISSN, the more accurately we can analyze duplication across the membership, identify deepest backfiles for strategic proposal, and support Archive Builder calls for holdings. Increasing the number of matched records also means that more members will have an opportunity to participate in archiving work, supporting the distributed nature of the WEST archive. In order to support all of these goals, WEST has implemented a new enhancement by which missing ISSNs are retrieved via the OCLC WorldCat Search API during ingest. For this round of collections analysis, the AGUA team retrieved ISSNs for 74,198* records that were submitted without ISSNs. Overall, 44,103* of those records were then successfully matched to a journal family. These are significant gains in content for the WEST analysis – representing 5-6% of overall records that matched to a journal family. Outside of these gains, in 11,006† records, ISSNs were corrected based on the API outputs.
The Operations and Collections Council (OCC) is overseeing collections analysis this year and has already provided guidance on initial parameters to develop Bronze proposals for Archive Holders (Title Categories 1 and 6, low-risk). Initial summary reports are available to any WEST member and may be accessed through the AGUA dashboard.
- Summary by Category: reports on how many journal families fall into each duplication level per title category
- Summary by Institution: summarizes key record ingest information per institution, e.g. records submitted, records with an ISSN, number of records matching to a journal family, etc.
It is anticipated that Cycles 8 and 9 archiving proposals will be available in June, when Archive Holders and Builders will declare their commitments through the AGUA dashboard.
*De-duplicated based on contributor OCLC symbol; intended to address ‘split’ holdings submitted from the same contributor.
†De-duplicated based on ISSN – meaning at the ‘title-level’.