Like a Snowball Gathering Speed: Development of ASERL's Print Journal Retention Program

The Association of Southeastern Research Libraries has instituted a distributed print archive program to share the costs and effort of long-term retention of print journals. Beginning with a review of the history of the project, the authors address the voluntary nature of participation in the program, methodologies for identifying journals to be retained, as well as methodologies for tagging retained journals so that an accurate record of current decisions is maintained over the 25-year length of the commitment. Policies and procedures continue to evolve as participation increases and lessons are learned with each step.     

CIC Co-Investment to Protect Print Research Library Collections in the Midwestern United States

The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) is one of the nation's oldest and most respected academic consortia. The CIC libraries hold more than 85 million volumes with print collections occupying approximately 10 million linear feet—or 2,000 miles—of shelving. The price tag for maintaining CIC print holdings, in stacks and storage facilities, is approximately $200 million per year. Between 2009 and 2011, the CIC University Librarians (ULs) affirmed a list of core principles for developing and managing a shared storage program. The ULs made an initial investment to support building a shared collection of 250,000 journal backfile volumes to be housed at Indiana University.