Deselection Deep Dive: University of Wyoming’s Experience with the WEST Internet Archive Pilot
Written with Jamie Markus, Associate Dean of Library Collections, University of Wyoming.
Setting the Stage
In September of 2024, WEST launched a pilot to amplify and support library collaborative strategies for print collection management and preservation. Specifically, the pilot involved coordinating the donation of duplicate copies of WEST archived titles to the Internet Archive to expand digitization and access via ILL for print serials.
The pilot was designed to work with existing or upcoming journal review projects undertaken by WEST member libraries. A call was distributed to the WEST membership inviting libraries to consider participating. The WEST Internet Archive Implementation Task Force worked with libraries to assess overlap between the pilot collection scope and library journal review aims. The final cohort of pilot libraries was determined based on the degree of overlap and the capacity of libraries to participate as outlined in the pilot’s scope of work. University of Wyoming, University of California Berkeley, University of Arizona, University of Colorado Denver Anschutz Medical Campus, University of California Riverside, and University of Colorado Boulder all agreed to participate in the pilot.
Over the next several months, pilot libraries met to move through the process of selecting and shipping content to the Internet Archive, working together to establish workflows and provide feedback that would help inform the WEST Internet Archive Pilot – Final Report and Recommendations.
Pilot work is still ongoing for some participants, but University of Wyoming finished shipping their selected titles in Spring 2025. Below are some of their thoughts about the outcomes of the pilot deselection process.
Outcome
How did WEST or shared print help you with your project?
We approached this project as a way to use our non-circulating collections to support access by all WEST members. In our minds, keeping items on our shelf for WEST or sending them to be digitized serves the same purpose – ensuring access.
Additionally, we have a relatively new Collections team at the University of Wyoming and we just migrated to a new Integrated Library System. This project gave us the opportunity to stretch the boundaries and skills of our team as well as our knowledge of our system – it was a fun win in a number of ways.
Have you reclaimed space? Other resources?
Yes. This project pulled 4000+ volumes from our offsite storage location, the Library Annex.
How are you using your reclaimed resources?
Within a few months, the open shelf space was used to hold items that needed special handling during an RFID tagging project that touched all 450,000 volumes in the Annex. Having this flex space allowed us to tag the Annex items more efficiently.
In the future, this shelf space will be filled with additional items from our main library. Filling up this offsite storage will allow us to add curriculum materials and a model elementary school library section to the main library.
What did you learn?
This project took a bit more time than we anticipated to pull the items and pack the boxes. The easiest and fastest way for us to complete this 4000+ item, eight pallet project was to box the items in one branch and deliver them to another branch for palletizing. This added a few more steps to our process, but ultimately made the pallet easier to pick up by the Internet Archive team.
Additionally, pulling the data into the needed marc/record format required more than a simple ILS report. This allowed the Collections team to explore a few tools and computer coding options to help add the barcodes to the records in an efficient manner.
And finally, we learned that we have an amazing Collections team and incredible student workers!
What would you say to others going through this kind of deselection or review project?
Like all good projects, start with the end in mind, review the process to make sure it is understandable and can be accomplished in the time allotted, and pick a team compilation and size that fits the work that needs to be done.
This was a pilot project, so our knowledge of the project and eventual process grew during every meeting. If we had a better sense of the process, we would have constructed our team slightly differently.
What do you wish you had done differently?
At this point, nothing. The joy of a pilot project is that there are a lot of unknowns. WEST and IA (and the teams!) offered support and options to pivot our project activities to support the conditions we faced. We originally wanted to ship as many items as possible (several trucks of pallets), however as we truly explored the work that needed to be done, the number of student workers we had on staff, and the limitations of the Annex as a location, we soon realized that shipping a half-a-truck worth of items would be a more workable project. WEST and IA were amazing partners to work with; they allowed us to downgrade our project to make it far more workable. This, in turn, will allow us to look at future projects with clearer eyes so we can see the probable workflow needed before we commit to any action.
What’s next?
The University of Wyoming looks forward to future iterations of this project. We are more than happy to participate, or consider participating, in another round of digitization. We have a better sense of scope and timing and would look to hire someone to manage this project on our behalf the next time we participate.