While the circulation and use of our print collections have dropped exponentially over the last decade, print materials will continue to be essential in many disciplines, and the University of Arizona Libraries will continue to acquire them whenever they're needed. Now and into the future, however, our strategic emphasis on print will be:
- to actively participate in the building of a richer and more accessible, network-level print collection that's shared and stewarded across major research libraries (including UA) and made rapidly available through interlibrary loan, and
- to prioritize the stewardship of legacy print materials in our own collections
- that we have committed to retain as part of a collaborative shared print program, or
- that have demonstrated clear value to UA users (through circulation or on-site use) or are of especial local or regional importance (e.g., published or authored by local or UA entities/authors; on topics related to Southern Arizona/the border region and its cultures, histories, and peoples, etc.)
These equally important strategic areas of focus will continue to guide our stewardship practices and decisions.
Stewardship in practice at UAL
In support of the first area, we have committed to retain nearly 610,000 monographic titles (and hundreds of scholarly journal runs) through several collaborative national and regional shared print programs. These are major commitments; the monographic commitments alone represent nearly 20% of our entire circulating monographic collection. Largely, these are titles that are not widely held across US institutions, and for which there continues to be an inadequate number of libraries committing to retain them. Our commitment to these titles supports the long-term stewardship of the scholarly record in print across academic libraries. For that reason, in our decisions we only considered the rarity of the material in the U.S. and not local use data.
In support of the second, we are carefully reviewing more than 30 years of collections’ use data as an indicator of the value of materials in our collection to our users over time. This includes data on circulation as well as on browsing and on-site use.
Now and into the future, should UAL be compelled to free up space (e.g., for new acquisitions, building renovations, or for strategic space needs that require reducing our print footprint), we will use these priorities to guide our decisions on what to keep and what to deselect. Materials that do not demonstrably further one of these two core goals will be prioritized for deselection. Beyond these criteria, we will also consider data such as digital availability and physical condition (for deselection) and artefactual value and local importance (for retention).