Notes from WEST’s January 2021 Members’ Meeting
WEST’s 2021 winter members’ meeting was held virtually on January 28. Meeting participants included a number of first-time attendees, and included staff representing Archive Builders, Archive Holders, and Non-Archive Holders as well as staff from one of WEST’s Rosemont Alliance partner programs.
2021 WEST Executive Committee Chair Dena Hutto (Reed College) opened the meeting, providing a welcome to attendees and a brief reflection on WEST’s activities and accomplishments over the past year. In a very tumultuous and stressful year, WEST members continued to move the program mission forward: two members, University of Denver and University of Missouri, Columbia, joining the Archive Builders to engage in consolidating and preserving higher risk journals for WEST; WEST members also volunteered their time to sit on working groups to review and revise WEST access, disclosure, and validation policies, and to investigate new formats to which the WEST program might consider expanding its preservation activities. The multitude of crises all members faced in 2020 make clear the importance of the WEST program goals to support strategic local collection management by collaborating to preserve print at scale.
- The WEST project team then provided a brief refresher on the WEST collaboration and program updates, including
- Archiving progress as of the end of Cycle 9
- Cycles 10 & 11 archiving commitments
- Updates to the WEST website and AGUA decision support center
- Progress of the WEST Disclosure and Validation Standards, Resource Sharing, and Non-journal Formats working groups
- New WEST guidelines and resources for archivers
The project team then gave an update on the current AGUA development phase and an overview of the projects that were prioritized for development by the Operations and Collections Council (OCC). This overview was followed by a deep dive discussion into the possibilities for local discovery of WEST collections, including member wants and needs, and feedback on possible technical avenues for the AGUA development team to pursue. This highly productive conversation surfaced a number of considerations and ideal scenarios for members, and will be used to help guide further refinement of this development project.
Finally, the project team gave updates on WEST’s external collaborations. WEST served as the 2020 chair for the Rosemont Shared Print Alliance Operations Committee, during which time the Rosemont Alliance admitted the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) as the newest partner program, achieved the goal of adding 100,000 new titles to the collective Rosemont collections, ratified the Last Copy Agreement and launched the Last Known Copy Initiative pilot project to identify and secure retention commitments for scarce materials held in participating libraries, and expanded communication resources to create and distribute informational videos on the value of shared print. Attendees also received an update on the CDL/CRL/Hathitrust collaboration on the completion of the first ‘Quick Win’ project to build a tool to allow institutions to compare their local serials collections against the CRL PAPR database: http://papr.crl.edu/tools/compare
For anyone who was unable to attend the meeting in person, or who wants to revisit any part of it, please see the meeting recording, presentation slide deck, and discussion document with attendee feedback on local discovery of WEST collections:
- WEST Members Meeting January 2021 (recording)