OCLC Report on Regional Print Mega-Collections

OCLC, the library research and services corporation based in Dublin, Ohio, has published a report on Print Management at "Mega-scale": A Regional Perspective on Print Book Collections in North America:

"The future of print book collections has received much attention, as libraries consider strategies to manage down print while transitioning to digital alternatives. The opportunity for collaboration is a recurring theme in these discussions. The OCLC Research report Cloud- sourcing Research Collections: Managing Print in the Mass-digitized Library Environment (Malpas 2011) considers the prospects for shifting the locus of print book management models from local collections to regionally-consolidated shared collections  (...)"

"A key question is the nature of the consolidated regional collections themselves—what would they look like? How similar or dissimilar would they be? Taken together, would the regional collections constitute a system of similar print book aggregations duplicated in different geographical regions, or would each collection represent a relatively unique component of the broader, system-wide
print book corpus? These and other questions are relevant to a variety of broader issues, including mass digitization, resource sharing, and preservation (...)"

"Investigating the characteristics of a system of regionally-consolidated shared print book collections requires two elements: a model of regional consolidation, and data to support analysis of collections within that framework. This paper employs the mega-regions framework for the first and the WorldCat bibliographic database for the second. Mega-regions are geographical regions defined on the basis of economic integration and other forms of interdependence. The mega-regions framework has the benefit of basing consolidation on a substantive underpinning of shared traditions, mutual interests, and the needs of an overlapping constituency."

"This report explores a counterfactual scenario where local US and Canadian print book collections are consolidated into regional shared collections based on the mega-regions framework. We begin by briefly reviewing the conclusions from the Cloud-sourcing report, and then present a simple framework that organizes the landscape of print book collection consolidation models and distinguishes the basic assumptions underpinning the Cloud-sourcing report and the present report. We then introduce the mega-regions framework, and use WorldCat data to construct twelve mega-regional consolidated print book collections. Analysis of the regional collections is synthesized into a set of stylized facts describing their salient characteristics, as well as key cross-regional relationships among the collections. The stylized facts motivate a number of key implications regarding access, management, preservation, and other topics considered in the context of a network of regionally consolidated print book collections."