Constance Malpas
Program Officer
RLG Programs OCLC Research
In 2009/10, the ‘Cloud Library’ project tested the proposition that a significant proportion of books in an academic research library could be more cost-effectively sourced from shared print and digital archives while satisfying current service expectations of library patrons and staff. The project was supported in part by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). OCLC Research conducted an overlap analysis of the monographic collections of three representative entities, while staff from the participating repositories conferred on minimum requirements for a shared service agreement. The outcomes of this project are expected to be of broad interest to academic institutions seeking to realign library collections and services to better support networked scholarly information practices. This session will recount the challenges of collecting and analyzing the collections data, reveal the results of the overlap analysis, and discuss how these results affected the process of creating a satisfactory service framework.
