The Western Regional Storage Trust reports that the first archiving cycle has come to a close, with twelve archive holders promising to retain for 25 years “6,100 journal titles …[representing] over 160,000 volumes. These totals include almost 5,100 Bronze titles (archived in place, no validation), over 500 Silver titles (validated at the volume level), and over 500 Gold titles (validated at the issue level).”
There are two more archiving cycles planned. Each cycle includes a collection analysis that “prioritizes materials for archiving based on risk and duplication, [and] identifies potential Archive Holders/Builders for those materials…” We’ll likely be hearing two more rounds of requests to volunteer some of our holdings for select titles.
One driver for creating WEST was member institutions’ shared concern that all can foresee a time when local shelving will be full. WEST is being built, at least in part, in the hope of mediating this problem by identifying protected print copies held communally and accessible through Interlibrary Loan. Now that WEST is becoming real, I’ll be initiating conversations to discuss how we will integrate the WEST archives into our collections policies.
–Bernie