This presentation was provided by Carla Lee and Tim Morton of The University of Virginia Library, during the NISO event "Where Does it Live? Storing Collections On and Off Campus, Part One" held on December 11, 2019

1. Print collection management during a major
renovation
Carla Lee, Deputy University Librarian
Tim Morton, Manager of Resource Acquisition & Description
University of Virginia Library
It Can’t Stay Here…

2. Facilities Background

3. University Cultural Background
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA

4. Institutional Commitment to the
Monograph and Institutional History

5. Community engagement about
the renovation
• Series of eight open town meetings with faculty, staff, and students.
• Numerous additional meetings with internal stakeholders,
architects, and both University and Library project teams.
• User surveys to gather requirements, concerns, etc.
• One-on-one meetings with faculty/students and the Alderman
Renovation Collections Team.
• All renovation news and documents made publicly available.
• https://www.library.virginia.edu/renovation/

6. • Liaison departmental engagement
• Provide data with context on the public website.
• Expand LEO service to graduate students
• Make Ivy more visible as a public service point
• Unicode compliance for display and searching of non-Roman
alphabets
• Virgo 4 to enhance browsing and discovery
Policy and Service Changes

7. Key facilities during the renovation

8. The interim collection
• We did a complete inventory of Alderman's collection to provide the best
possible data set to analyze
• 700,000 items on compact shelving in Clemons Library.
• 200,000 spots left open for growth, near-site recalls.
• 500,000 spots for initial interim collection
• 75% for recently-acquired items and high-use items, as identified by our
algorithm
• 10% for boutique collections, UVa-related collections, titles on graduate
reading and comps prep lists, and catalog-related search problems
• 10% for faculty/student requests
• 5% for liaison librarian requests
• We’re committed to regular, ongoing evaluation of this collection to keep it
vibrant and relevant to our community.

9. What is eligible to stay on-grounds?
• By default, the following items are being sent to Ivy Stacks:
• Microfilm/microfiche/microcards – low usage, requires special
machinery
• Maps – low usage and high space requirements
• GovDocs – moderate usage but all in the public domain
• Journals – low usage but high discoverability, high space requirements,
article scanning available
• Those categories represent ~50% of the items , but only ~15% of the usage.
***But, any of these can be reserved via faculty/student/liaison requests.***

10. Do we want the interim collection to mirror Alderman
as it is, or model what Alderman could be?
• 100+ years’ worth of collections to sort through.
• Should past library priorities be reflected in what we choose to keep
on-grounds today?
• For most call number ranges, there is a significant gap between the
relative size of that call number class within the collection, and the
amount of use attributable to that call number class.

11. The new, responsive collection
• Removal of some call number classes from Alderman Library entirely
• Music, Art, Sciences all have dedicated libraries.
• UX testing shows splitting call numbers across facilities
negatively impacts access.
• Their removal frees up 2% of the stacks space.
• Reassignment of call numbers to specific libraries may be
expanded post-renovation.
• Allocation of space for remaining ranges based on actual use rather
than replicating the existing collection.
• Some ranges get 2.5x more room, others lose 80%+

12. Choosing the interim collection:
2 untenable extremes
Entirely patron-driven
• Doubtful of getting complete
responses.
• Duplicate responses.
• Not scalable to generate usable
picklist for stacks team.
• Random locations in off-site stacks
makes post-renovation retrieval
difficult.
• Lack of knowledge for users to make
reasonable decisions about any part of
the collection, except their small slice.
Entirely data-driven
• Certain disciplines over- or under-
represented.
• Journal runs and multi-volume sets
randomly split up.
• Users don’t trust the data.
• Distrust of accuracy of data
• Even if accurate, usage data not most
important metric
• "You can’t measure our browsing"

13. Determining target size for each
call number class
Call Number Class Percentage of Checkouts Percentage of Alderman Collection Circ Ratio Target Clemons Size
D 1.93% 1.99% 0.971083106 7,255
DA 1.65% 1.53% 1.080594816 6,198
DAW 0.01% 0.00% 1.634062975 24
DB 0.13% 0.36% 0.352548646 476
DC 0.79% 0.94% 0.836417045 2,958
DD 0.62% 1.12% 0.550716613 2,310
DE 0.09% 0.08% 1.212790385 348
DF 0.48% 0.24% 2.019175162 1,805
DG 0.73% 0.90% 0.814956133 2,739
DH 0.03% 0.06% 0.458788875 105
DJ 0.02% 0.07% 0.291549044 71
DJK 0.04% 0.05% 0.70005758 133
DK 0.82% 1.16% 0.70978654 3,077
DL 0.04% 0.11% 0.329163765 133
DP 0.34% 0.55% 0.614581943 1,258
DQ 0.01% 0.06% 0.161817023 38
DR 0.22% 0.40% 0.562179722 838
DS 3.60% 4.56% 0.789377011 13,491
DT 1.11% 1.35% 0.820695306 4,154
DU 0.10% 0.17% 0.611964139 386
DX 0.00% 0.01% 0.098184041 5
E 6.37% 2.80% 2.270840287 23,885
F 3.66% 3.36% 1.092350274 13,743

14. Creating a title list for each call
number range
• Potential quantitative data points
• Publication date
• Acquisition date
• Date of last patron usage
• Number of checkouts
• Number of renewals
• Number of in-house uses
• Number of copies/availability in other UVa libraries
• Number of volumes in multi-volume sets
• Potential qualitative data points
• How important is browsability?
• How important is currency?

15. Fun with math!
• x =
• Beta[1]*days_since_last_checkout +
• Beta[2]*total_checkouts +
• …
• Beta[n]*additional features
By Qef (talk) - Created from scratch with gnuplot, Public Domain,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4310325
Created by Pete Alonzi, used by permission

16. Even more fun with math!
Created by Pete Alonzi, used by permission

17. The final verdicts
Call Number Library Title Pub Year Item Created Last Checkout In-house Use Checkouts Renewals Copies Other Libraries MultiVolume MODEL
HQ535 .F48 2000 CLEMONS Feuds about families : conservative, centrist, liberal, and feminist perspectives /2000 8/15/2014 12/7/2017 0 85 2 1 3 FALSE 1
HQ1638 .W55 2010 ALDERMAN Women in twentieth-century Italy /2010 2/8/2010 4/13/2018 2 60 2 1 2 FALSE 1
HQ535 .C416 2009 ALDERMAN The marriage-go-round : the state of marriage and the family in America today /2009 6/2/2009 4/5/2018 3 57 9 1 2 17 FALSE 1
HQ12 .F6813 1978 v.1 ALDERMAN The history of sexuality / 1978 7/3/2008 5/21/2018 85 62 63 5 2 3 TRUE 1
HQ1236.5 .P18 P35 1989 ALDERMAN Report of the Pakistan Commission on the status of women.1989 6/30/1996 5/13/2011 2 0 0 1 2 FALSE 0
HQ1613 .D5 1989 ALDERMAN 1789 : Cahiers de doléances des femmes, et autres textes /1989 6/30/1996 5/13/2011 3 0 0 1 2 FALSE 0
HQ1164 .M36 1982 ALDERMAN Herrenmenschen, Frauen im deutschen Kolonialismus /1982 6/28/1996 10/25/2011 1 0 0 1 2 FALSE 0
HQ31 .S96 2017 ALDERMAN Sex that works : an intimate guide to awakening your erotic life /2017 5/11/2017 5/17/2017 0 2 0 1 2 FALSE 1
HQ76.27 .A37 M86 2016 ALDERMAN Not straight, not white : Black gay men from the march on Washington to the AIDS crisis /2016 3/30/2016 4/12/2018 0 2 3 1 2 FALSE 1
HQ767.87 .D47 2008 ALDERMAN Designing modern childhoods : history, space, and the material culture of children /2008 3/11/2008 3/14/2017 4 5 1 1 2 FALSE 1
HQ1381 .B46 2016 ALDERMAN Gender, development, and globalization : economics as if all people mattered /2016 12/9/2015 7/2/2018 0 2 6 1 2 FALSE 1
HQ1173 .G86 2001 ALDERMAN Sexuality, obscenity, community : women, muslims, and the Hindu public in colonial India /2001 10/30/2003 5/19/2018 4 6 11 1 2 FALSE 1
HQ792 .U5 C46 2007 ALDERMAN Children at play : an American history /2007 9/4/2007 8/21/2017 4 5 10 1 2 3 TRUE 1

18. Questions?