Ohio Regional Depositories: Moving from Warehousing Separate Collections to Servicing Shared Collections

In Ohio, the space needs of campus libraries are changing just as book depositories are filling up. In response to this situation, the university libraries are re-examining the depositories to see if the space can be used even more efficiently, the funding distributed more predictably, and the services standardized and expanded. The Northeastern Ohio Cooperative Regional Library Depository has a plan to rethink the space in the depository, redefine the collection housed there in terms of ownership and access, and to repurpose the depository from a warehouse model to a service-centered model. The Northeastern Ohio Regional Library Depository plan and its anticipated role in changing the way that contributing libraries statewide assess depository collections and provide for access to those collections is the focus of this paper.