Deselection Deep Dive: Graduate Theological Union’s Library Alteration Project

Written with Beth Kumar (Director of Library Services, GTU)

Setting the Stage

What are the specifics of your project? Why are you deselecting / reviewing your journal holdings? 

In 2021 we began a library alteration project that required the GTU to consolidate the research collections from 3 floors down to 1 main floor and a basement. This meant reducing the total collection footprint by about 30%. But we also wanted to avoid long term storage costs that we would sustain by simply moving that 30% of the collection off-site, and we needed to sustain our status as a research organization by securing access to research content in print and digital forms in order to make sure our patrons had the resources they need.

What’s the climate at your campus when it comes to deselection? 

At first, the faculty and students were against the idea of deselection. GTU library collections were formed when individual seminary libraries were merged into a common theological library, starting in the 1960s. This process resulted in a lot of duplicate titles, with some high use titles having as many as eleven copies. By starting with a dedupe of the collection, the faculty and students saw that they would not be losing content and became more supportive of the project. We socialized the project by attending countless staff, departmental, and special meetings, making sure the campus community understood the reasoning, workflow, and timeline of the move. 

How are you employing WEST or shared print more generally in your journal review project?

To prepare for our review project, we decided to begin participation in two shared print programs, SCELC and WEST. SCELC we had already been a member of for a while but in the 2020/2021 fiscal year we joined their shared print program and committed for retention over 75,000 of our own monographs. At the same time we used OCLC’s collection analysis tool GreenGlass to make sure that the items we were deaccessioning were committed for retention at other SCELC participant libraries, with the ultimate goal being, to reestablish access to the things we had to physically remove from our collection. With the same idea in mind we began looking into participation in WEST. 

While we were unable to join WEST at the time that we were initially deaccessioning, we knew that we would be joining WEST in the near future, in the 23/24 fiscal year, and so we first used the Print Archives and Preservation Registry PAPR to compare our serials holding and start selecting for deaccessioning those items already committed for retention with WEST, and then we joined WEST’s Journal Retention and Needs Listing to contribute to fill gaps in the holdings of those institutions who had committed to retain titles we were deaccessioning so that we could make sure to retain access to those items in the future and not lose them entirely even if we didn’t have the space to commit to retaining them at a later date.

Outcome

How did WEST or shared print help you with your project? 

Ultimately, participation in shared print programs has provided the GTU two key enduring values which are represented in the tangible and intangible benefits I laid out before: access, and advocacy. Not only was the GTU able to use Shared Print participation to restore access to items we removed during our alteration project, but we in turn gained access to hundreds of thousands of more items which we would otherwise not be able to provide to our patrons. Additionally, participation in Shared print through our own retention commitments brought an awareness to our collection from faculty and other patrons which has led to increased advocacy for our collection on our behalf from faculty and patrons who now can visually see one of the strengths of our collection represented on the shelves, creating essentially a collection that can help advocate for itself.

Have you reclaimed space? Other resources? 

The main focus of our project was space, and through this project the library met its original goal of consolidating the research collection from 3 floors to 1.5 floors. This was through review of both our monographic and serial collections, but consolidating and relocating our serials played a huge part in our ability to meet this goal. 

How are you using your reclaimed resources? 

We used the reclaimed space to create three additional classrooms, offices for faculty and staff, as well as moving the art gallery from another building.. Now students can come to the library, attend classes, visit faculty, see the current gallery exhibit, and more all in the same centrally located building.

What did you learn? 

A lot! But one of the interesting things we learned was that publicly signifying our involvement in shared print could help to generate interest in the uniqueness of our collection!

We decided during our voluntary holdings validation process to physically mark items committed for retention. We’re just using a small sticker, indicating that those items are part of a shared print program. Our original thought process was to create a physical indicator to keep those items safe from any future deaccessioning projects. But we saw was that faculty and patrons in general were now coming up to us to ask about the stickers, which gave us the opportunity to tell them about the shared print programs we were a part of and what the stickers meant for those specific items. In turn we then saw increased interest in those times in the collection, increased awareness about the uniqueness of our collection, since a significant portion of the items we’ve retained are not widely held by other libraries, and increased investment then in the collection by faculty and patrons, especially members of the Faculty Library Committee, which in turn means increased investment and awareness of our collection in member schools as a whole since Faculty Library Committee members are often our first line of communication to member schools.

What would you say to others going through this kind of deselection or review project? 

Finding a way to make our involvement in shared print tangible to the folks at our library was a huge help in getting patrons on board with the changes that the collection was going through. Additionally, we were able to donate many of the items we deselected to the Internet Archive for digitization which enabled us to reframe the way our community was thinking about deselection. Instead of these items being ‘removed’ from the library collection, they were instead being digitized and would be accessible to an even wider audience. Having this collaboration in place made many conversations about the library alteration project much easier. 

What do you wish you had done differently?

Much of the work of pulling books off the shelves, boxing, and then shifting collections is really physically demanding. In an ideal world, I would have liked to pace the project a little differently so that we could space out some of the physical work a bit more. But since the collection review was one part of the whole alteration we were working with a specific timeline and I think we did a fantastic job with the timing and resources that we had. 

What’s next?

We have begun an expansive review process of the duplicates that remain in our branch library and off-site storage facilities. We intend to bring the unique Shared Print items from the branch over to our Main Library, for easier accessibility to students and Interlibrary loan services, as the branch has more limited staff and hours. Additionally, the original project to reduce the collection by 30% primarily looked at our regularly-sized circulating collection and reference collections, for ease of packing and handling standard sized boxes. Our current review includes all sizes including large oversized folios. 

With our partner, Internet Archive, we not only continue to send items for digitization, but they have set up an in-library digitization center to handle our most unique and fragile items. This workflow has allowed us to provide patrons access to the digital surrogates of the Shared Print items while reducing the handling and wear of these items. The digitization center is currently funded by external grants, and we are seeking additional grant opportunities to eventually scan the majority of our unique items.