(via Helen Levenson, Oakland University)
The Risk Research Working Group of the Partnership for Shared Book Collections invites your participation on an advisory panel looking at a tool for determining the number of copies of a title that a shared print consortium must commit to keeping in order to ensure the survival of at least one usable copy.
Your volunteer participation involves a one-hour small-group videoconference meeting to discuss the model plus one to two hours in advance to review written materials. Primarily, we are looking for your expertise and experience working with library collections as a reality check on the assumptions and parameters used for this tool.
Shared print programs have long struggled to determine just how many copies of each title must be preserved. The Risk Research Working Group has been reviewing this problem and working with Dr. Candice Yano of U.C. Berkeley to develop a tool to project the number of copies of monograph titles needed to hit a target probability that at least one usable copy will survive after a given time horizon. Modeling the projected survival of books is complicated because of the quantity of risk factors, the ways these risks interplay, and insufficient hard data to describe the loss and deterioration of books in libraries. Dr. Yano has helped us create a flexible tool with options to input different rates for the loss or deterioration of books from different causes. Our research has identified tentative numbers to use for those rates. We are looking to you to help us check, is our reasoning accurate? Are the compromises we inevitably had to make reasonable?
If you can help us out, please respond on this Google form to confirm your interest and select dates of availability. Each panel session is limited to 7 to 10 participants. We will try to accommodate everyone who volunteers, but we may not have space to include everyone who responds. We will follow up to confirm whether or not you are on a panel and the date and will send you links to a small packet of information in advance.
If you have questions, please contact the group at SharedPrintRisk@umich.edu. We appreciate your expertise and advice!