Good morning! My name is Susan Payne and I am the Head of Assessment and User Experience at the Sheridan Libraries, at Johns Hopkins University. Today I’m going to talk about a collection assessment project that we have affectionately renamed as the “Big Move” relating to making decisions about what should stay in the library post-renovation to form a meaningful, relevant, and useful collection.
"The culling process is a librarian's dream…”
-Sheryl Katzin
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Some people love to weed. I am one of those librarians, so I could identify with a recent story in the Chicago Tribune about the luxury of time to thoughtfully weed a collection. Running recently in the Chicago Tribune and on social media, the article quoted Sheryl Katzin, Assistant Director of Collections for the D.C. Public Library System: "The culling process is a librarian's dream, says Sheryl Katzin, assistant director of collections for the D.C. Public Library system. The impetus to weed for us is an upcoming renovation in the next 5-6 years.
Recently a learning commons was built next to the Eisenhower Library.
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It’s a beautiful building with light, windows, and flexible spaces for students. Through the windows into the other building, you can see the library.
1.2M
600,000
15% weeding
0% growth
11 months
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When the Eisenhower Library opened in 1964, adequate space seemed assured until well into the Twenty-First Century. As in the past, however, the building filled up more rapidly than anticipated; so that by 1979, space was at a premium. Study areas were converted to shelving, and corridors on the stack floors were narrowed to extend each shelf range. These were understood to be stopgap measures and several plans were considered for expanding the existing structure. In 1988, the library celebrated adding its two millionth volume. The current collection is 1.2 million volumes and we’ve asked selectors to move 600,000 volumes out of the building in anticipation of needing more space for the library services and student space we want the library to be able to offer. The Big Move project asked librarians to weed 15% of the collection and we’re currently working on figuring out how to keep the collection zero growth. The project was originally supposed to be completed in a year, with a month of planning and 11 months for librarians to make all of their decisions before involving technical services staff….Many things have gone like this and we have had success at weeding serials in particular as it tends to be the easiest from a workflow standpoint…but not always from a bibliographer or patron stand point.
74K+ STEM Serial Volumes
Deduped STEM volumes
40K+ Physics serial volumes
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What do these three numbers have in common? They are examples of serials that we’ve been able to withdraw or move off-site. In 2014 – 2015, 74,000+ volumes moved to off-site storage for STEM titles. In 2015, 40,000 serial volumes were withdrawn from an off-site reading room. Thanks to work by our Collections Analyst, we were also able to deduplicate years of titles in offsite storage for titles that had online equivalents that we had purchased, owned, and have perpetual access rights to them.
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Unlike the fantasy of closing the library and having time to thoughtfully weed the collection, our current process is not so easy. It is excel-based, and results in many spreadsheets. This is just a listing of one folder related to C level, so selectors may have many spreadsheets they need to review based on what subjects they are responsible for. Sometimes that is not always clear, but we were able to map every two letter call number to a librarian, and often a secondary one as well. We’ve never been able to do this before, in part because of the changing nature of cataloging rules, so it very helpful for librarians to understand which spreadsheets they should look at given the sheer number of the spreadsheets.
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This is an example of how one of the spreadsheet looks. Currently these are generated by directions generated from the Technical Services department. Then staff in that department spend quite a bit of time cleaning up the spreadsheet. Serials spreadsheets often feature merged cells, which works well for understanding what is going on with a title, but makes it difficult to manipulate the spreadsheet other than filtering it.
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By merging spreadsheets, it’s almost like we take a rubric’s cube and we dribble a bit of super glue inside, which makes it a much more static view. The end result, that is unintended, is this spreadsheet is very hard for selectors to manipulate and view. Given how large the spreadsheets are, sometimes 5000 rows or more, it is also hard to get a visual in your head about what the information on the spreadsheet really represents in terms of space or size.
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To help alleviate some of the pain points staff had felt related to collections assessment, we formed an initiating group consisting of selectors (librarians), the Head of Technical Services, The Head of Collection Development, the project manager and other stakeholders to create a project charter that outlined the scope, requirements, team members, communication, etc.
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After this was charter was accepted, the Collection Analyst (David Dudek) and I went around to discipline group meetings and introduced the idea of dividing up the collection by playing with lego bricks. Purple blocks were humanities, yellow were social sciences, red were science & engineering, and orange were various small collections. The exercise involved sorting out the blocks into different buckets by how many could stay in the library (5-6 blocks), how many could move off-site (4-5), and how many could be withdrawn (as many as participants wanted). Interestingly, each group had very strong opinions about what should happen with the red blocks before the exercise, and yet, through the exercise, each group came to the same conclusion and sorted out the blocks in almost the same way.
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We took a tiny step to try to disrupt existing workflow, because in years past there is an overwhelming preference to just move material to offsite storage entirely and there isn’t enough space left to accommodate that kind of transfer. So we came up with the idea of a feedback loop, where spreadsheets would be intercepted after a librarian finished with them and before they would have traditionally gone back to Technical Services. Given that it is hard to visualize the spreadsheets, we wanted to try to provide some basic metrics for decisions that librarians were making, to show if they had decided that material should stay here in the library, if it should move to off-site storage, or should it be withdrawn. To do this we started counting shelves, using a formula that measured the inches on a shelf (35). The formula is =(Number of Shelves*35)/12
=(Number of Shelves*35)/12
TS
Project Team
BibliographersAssessment
Feedback Group
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The new workflow for the project begins and ends with Technical Services. They generated the spreadsheets, it went to the project team who were responsible for generating instructions and cleaning up new spreadsheets (this fell to me). The spreadsheets then went to the selectors / bibliographers and after they finished, then back to me before going to a feedback group. The idea is to disrupt the workflow at this stage to let librarians have some metrics about their decisions to see if they want to make different ones.
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This is a sample of how it works, simple, but shows what they decided to try to see if they’re anywhere close to the numbers everybody agreed about in the beginning with the lego block exercise.
What Has Gone Wrong
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This is a large and complicated project. While many things have been going right, there have been lessons learned and I think it’s important to recognize those mistakes, observe what works, document them, and share them….or we as an orgnanization will never learn and improve our process.
Cost of Change
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The first lesson learn is we did well with the project charter, but we didn’t account for what happens when a team member no longer agrees with the project charter. The longer you go in the project, the more costly any change is. Our project encountered a significant disruption when some librarians become frustrated with the spreadsheets and began to investigate a new workflow. To get the project back on track I introduced the idea of an issue log and change request, which so far seems to be helping bring the split workflow back in line with less friction.
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When the Moravia Park facility became overcrowded, planning began for a larger, purpose-built facility, which opened on the campus of the Applied Physics Laboratory in November 2005. The Libraries Service Center now offers an expandable space to accommodate growing collections, both books and manuscripts, in controlled environmental conditions. Space available was only 600K at the beginning of the project, not taking into account new receipts, ongoing arrivals. Later this was revised to a more realistic 500,000 and I suspect the number will be lower than this by the time transfers start to roll over.
What Went Right
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Even though there have been challenges, many things have gone right. One good decision was to try to integrate into existing meetings, rather than create entirely new and separate meetings.
Two librarians responsible for 80% of weeded serial titles
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Even though librarians recognize there isn’t enough space at off-site storage, they’re making what they feel are best decisions for the collection. Unfortunately we are under the 15% weeding because only two librarians from humanities actually withdrew titles. This means that the deficit will need to be made up on non-serial titles, which may be problematic – but we’ll have to wait until all the material in the library is reviewed before we’ll know truer numbers.
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One of the pain points for librarians was a fear of excel and that they worried they might break spreadsheets. As a result, and because of this project, I coplanned and taught (with Liz Johns and Shannon Simpson) a Data Visualization Course.
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We brainstormed about what questions to they have about data and why do we collect data.
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We also asked librarians to identify what sort of questions they wanted to ask about the collection, and then later sorted them into tiers of easy to get and manipulate data, medium-level difficult to obtain / analyze, and expertise needed to analyze/generate that data. An example included the desire to understand what type of patron is using parts of the collection and for what purpose. Even though this seems simple on the face, the data is not easy to get in our ILS and the purpose issue is not something that would be something that could be understood from library data.
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Frustrations with existing spreadsheets led us to think about a new project about how can we visualize data in the library on a map using GIS. This offshoot uses the StackMap API and GIS to help visualize materials in the library.
Weeding High Density Storage
• Different sources of data• Lack of common unique identifier• Incomplete or partial data from users• Success: combined licensed and perpetual
data information with check out and scan data
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In the meantime, I also tried to work up a way to weed serials out of offsite storage. I could easily generate a report of what was there. It was not so easy to connect this report up to more useful data, such as what material from there is scanned and set to users.
What Would Help Next Time?
• Start with Good Data• Build realistic timeframes• Remember change processes for projects• Connect Serials titles to OCLC IDs• Better visualization of library data
Good Practices• Clear goals for the group• Team should be
representative, inclusive and the right size
• Team member roles should be explicit and agreed upon by group members
• Set regular meeting times and a plan to document and share the group’s activities
• Engage team in meaningful work
• Focus on small projects with measurable impacts. For larger projects, consider spreading over multiple years with measurable impacts
• Communicate results through multiple channels
Analyze Collection Data
Retention Commitments
Weed / Preserve / DiscoveryAccess
Review, reconsider, renew
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The idea is to gradually disrupt the old workflow so that we can still have great customer service, but with better ability to analyze, access, discover, weed, review, and renew our collections – especially as we shift into a time where shared collections are increasingly relevant.
If we want a better end result, start with more meaningful and useable information.
