1. Update on EAST PAN ALA Annual June 24, 2016
Susan Stearns, Project Director
Matthew Revitt, Shared Print Consultant
Good morning. Matthew and I are now going to give you a quick tour of the Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust project. We’re tag teaming and I’m on first.

2. The Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust
This heat map from the SCS GreenGlass application shows the distribution of the EAST Retention Partner collections across the Northeast and extending as far south as Maryland.
We currently have 48 member libraries, 39 of which are Retention Partners and 9 Supporting Partners.

3. Leadership and Governance
EAST project team:
Anna Perricci, EAST Project Manager
Lizanne Payne, Shared Print Consultant
Matthew Revitt, Shared Print Consultant
Sara Amato, EAST Data Librarian
Susan Stearns, Executive Director, Boston Library Consortium
PIs on Mellon grant: Laura Wood (Tufts) & Tara Fulton (UNH)
Executive Committee (primary governance)
Sustainable Collection Services (SCS)
Monographs Working Group
Validation Working Group
583 Working Group
The organization development and initial implementation of EAST is supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Davis Educational Foundation. Once the grant awards were finalized last June, we began recruitment for the EAST staff.
By the fall we had the staff you see listed here on Board and beginning in October of last year, EAST members elected an Executive Committee and appointed two working groups to focus on the two primary deliverables for our first year of work – completion of the collection analysis work with SCS so that we could finalize retentions and development and the development of our first validation sample study.

4. EAST Major Milestones - 2016
Staffing - complete
Establish governance - complete
Data extracts for collection analysis - complete
GreenGlass rolled out – complete
Development of retention model(s) – complete
Executive Committee approves final retention model – COMPLETE!
Retention proposals reviewed – June 24 through July 29
Retention commitments finalized in GreenGlass – by mid to late August
Policy reviews – In process
Major policies submitted for approval – In process
MOU developed – In process for completion in Sept.
MOU submitted for approval – Sept./Oct.
EAST members execute MOU – Oct. – Dec.
Validation Sample Study #1 – COMPLETE!
Planning for second validation sample study– July – August
Conduct second validation sample study– Oct./Nov.
This slide is really just to brag about the amount of work the EAST team and member libraries have accomplished over the last 9 months.
Matthew and I will talk more about the 3 major focuses for work this year:
The validation sample study
The collection analysis work, with incredible support from SCS, and resultant retention proposals to the EAST libraries
The policy work which will culminate in a formal – but lightweight we hope – Memorandum of Understanding for the EAST member libraries to execute by year’s end

5. Validation Sample Study #1
An important aspect of the funding of EAST by the Mellon Foundation was developing ways to validate the trust that scholars would need to have in retention commitments, particularly as their local institutions began to deselect titles committed for retention elsewhere.
T0 address this, we proposed two SAMPLE validation sample studies.
The first of these was completed Feb – April of this year and involved sampling 240,000 items across 40 of the EAST libraries – a random sampling of 6K titles per library based on the extract provided to SCS.
Our data librarian, Sara Amato deserves a huge shout out for the work she did, in conjunction with one of the EAST Working Groups, to develop tools and documentation for this ambitious undertaking.
At a high level, the methodology was as follows:
We worked with SCS to provide each library with a random sample of holdings from the data extracts they had supplied. It was important to exclude certain locations in this – primarily offsite storage - and eventually ensure the lists were sorted by location and call number to optimize efficiency of the workers.
Sara then worked with the Validation Working Group to develop documentation for each of the ILS’ represented across the 40 EAST libraries so that each library could do a check of their local circulation systems prior to going to the shelves and record items known to be in circulation. These were then removed from the shelf check lists.
And, Sara developed and the Working Group tested a collection tool that allowed the workers – most of whom were students – to go to the shelves with a laptop or tablet, pull up a list of items, locate the item on the shelf, scan the barcode to indicate its presence and do a cursory condition check based on a 3 point scale.
The Working Group and Sara also developed a training video and documentation for the libraries to facilitate training of the local student workers.
Here you see some screen shots from the collection tool. Sara has just uploaded the details of her code and documentation to GitHub and the URL is here for that as well.

6. Result of VSS#1 97% of monographs accounted for
90% in average or excellent condition, 10% poor
Further data analysis in process:
Items publisher pre-1900 are in poorer condition
Widely circulated items are slightly more likely to be unaccounted for:
We now have high level results from the first validation sample study and they are impressive:
Some 97% of the items were accounted for – meaning either available on shelf as expected or checked out
Of these, 90% were determined to be in average or excellent condition.
We are working with our statistical consultant now to further analyze the data from VSS#1 and will be providing a more complete report over the summer and fall. We are also working with the consultant and the co-PI’s on the Mellon grant to develop a detailed methodology for our second validation sample study. We had originally expected to investigate further the impact of redundancy on retention – how many copies of a title should be kept across diverse local collections such as EAST to best ensure that a copy will be available. However, our initial data have so far indicated that this might not be a fruitful area of further research since based on the VSS#1 data, having multiple copies across the EAST libraries did not reduce or increase the availability metric.
You’ll see here a couple of additional data points that we may investigate further:
Much older materials are in significantly poorer condition than the average across EAST, which was 10%. Pre-1900 items were 45% more likely to be in poor condition.
And, items that had been widely circulated at an individual EAST member library were somewhat more likely to be missing [or at least unaccounted for] with a 4.3% likelihood of NOT being available vs. the 3% overall for EAST.
While neither of this is really surprising, we do believe we have quite a robust data set from the VSS#1 study and want to work with out consultant to analyze it as completely as possible with the grant funding we have in the hopes of further informing retention modeling in the future.

7. The EAST Collective Collection 16,573,071 4,749,042 50%
title holdings
16,573,071
title sets
4,749,042
title sets held by one library in the group
50%
2,359,033 title sets
title sets with > 10 aggregate uses
20%
939,819 title sets
title sets represented in HathiTrust
39%
1,865,115 title sets
I’m going to turn it over briefly to Matthew now to discuss the EAST Collective Collection.

8. The EAST Retention Model
Retain one holding of every title
Retain all holdings of scarcely held titles
Retain up to 5 holdings of frequently used titles
The EAST Retention model will result in EAST libraries’ committing to retain just over 6 million holdings.
The model itself, which was initially recommended by the Monograph Working Group and approved last week by the Executive Committee, has 3 major components:
The first focuses on retaining SCARECELY HELD holdings – as defined by looking at the holdings in WorldCat as well as comparator groups of non-EAST libraries in the Northeast
The second focused on retaining FREQUENTLY used holdings – based on the aggregate uses of the EAST libraries
And, the third focused on retaining one copy of everything else that meets the criteria of the model – which EXCLUDES recently published materials as well as certain materials categorized as ephemera.

9. For most libraries: A maximum of 36% holdings to be retained
A few exceptions
Five Colleges Depository at 100%
U Mass-Amherst at up to 90%
Yeshiva University at up to 60%
Elms College at up to 50%
After considered discussion by both the Monography Working Group and the Executive Committee, it was agreed that ALL Retention Partners would be asked to meet the requirements of the model and commit to retaining up to 36% of their collections for EAST. We did have a few exceptions, libraries willing to commit a significantly higher percentage…..
Next steps:
EAST retention model approved by EC on June 6th
SCS now begins the allocation process
SCS developing a video to provide to EAST libraries on how to review the allocations
Anna will be in touch once the allocations are available to be downloaded by each Retention Partner– expect an to go 24th
Libraries will be asked to complete their review by July 29

10. Post Allocation Work
OCLC work on a new batch disclosure tool but not sure when available or whether it will be affordable for such a large project
The EAST “583” committee
Focus on developing guidelines for EAST members to update local ILS’ and union catalogs
Chaired by Sara Amato and working with representatives of the different ILS’ in EAST
Goal is to have documentation available by summer’s end
Libraries will also begin their own work on weeding and de- selection
Timeline – guidelines from the 583 committee by end August in conjunction with completion of retention commitments and reload into GreenGlass
Flag in GG which then allows reports to be run – see the SCS videos on post-allocation
Copy the charge
Looking at each ILS and taking into consideration union catalogs

11. Policy and MOU Work
Policy subgroup of the Monograph Working Group working with the EAST team, led by Matthew Revitt
Critical to keep the goals and mission of EAST and the focus of retention upper most
Flexibility sometimes [lending] but not when it does not serve retention [the “floor” decision]
Executive Committee indispensable in this work
Selection
Ownership and Location
Retention
Validation
Access & Fulfillment
Delivery
Operating Procedures
Disclosure
Discovery
Expect to add policies relating to retained holdings found to be in unacceptable condition or missing as well as those relating to member’s inability to continue their retention commitments
In parallel to the collection analysis work, the EAST team and a subgroup of the Monograph Working Group, is actively reviewing the policies that will apply to EAST. These policies are based on those that had been previously discussed and agtreed upon during the planning grant for EAST, so in most cases, we do not expect major changes.
The subgroup has begun meeting to review the policies and will continue this process through May. You’ll see here the major policy categories – selection, retention, and ownership, access & delivery, disclosure and discovery
This subgroup will also begin to discuss the specific language of the Memorandum of Understanding in the May/June timeframe.
In both cases, the goal is to have agreed upon policies and MOU terms to be reviewed by the EAST community this fall so that the formal MOU can be approved by the Executive Committee and EAST libraries can begin the process of formal execution of the MOU by year’s end.

12. Other Ongoing Work of the EAST Team
Validation Sample Study #2 – planning to begin July with statistical consultant and implementation to commence in fall
EAST outreach
“EAST by Northeast” article [
Recent presentations at ACRL New England and NETSL by Anna/Matthew
Membership meeting in October for both current and interested member libraries
Formal reports to the funding bodies on work to date
Budget surplus likely to result in additional work in FY17
On weeding: if a library must weed starting with items that do not fit the approved model would be best.  

13. Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust
We are in the midst of working on a standalone web site for EAST that we expect to launch toward the end of the summer, so stay tuned.