Executive Summary - Collection Management Plan

A review of the University of Melbourne Library collections with recommendations for management, primarily covering storage locations

Collection Management Plan - full document (1.7MB pdf) If you are unable to view or download this document, copy can be obtained by emailing Jennifer Eddy 

1. The Environment

The University of Melbourne Library operates across 20 service locations including 13 branches, 3 special collections, 2 stores, the University of Melbourne Archives and Grainger Museum to serve the requirements of Australia’s largest research university, covering 50,000 students and 11,000 staff.  The Library hosts more than 1.4 million visitors per year and undertakes over 1.3 million loan transactions.

In recent years, the Library has focused on the development of discipline based precinct libraries which in many cases are established with University student centres and Student IT locations to provide a hub for students.  Key developments have included the building of the Giblin Eunson Library, the redevelopment of the Eastern Resource Centre, Brownless Biomedical Library and the initial stages of redevelopment of the Baillieu Library.  In 2012, developments included relocation of the Architecture, Building and Planning Library and East Asian Collection to the Eastern Resource Centre to allow for building redevelopment and the transfer of the Research collection to discipline libraries including the integration of some collections at the Baillieu, Eastern Resource Centre and Architecture, Building and Planning libraries and extensive collection movements at the Baillieu library and Eastern Resource Centre to accommodate collections.

The Library has a variety of governance processes in place for collection management including library management, academic committees, a specialist Collections Committee and subcommittees, library user groups and collection development policies and procedures.

This collection management plan focuses on developments for 2013 through to 2018 and beyond.  It is based on interviews with key staff, a space analysis of most collection locations and a detailed assessment of item and checkin records from the Millennium Library Management System, which provides the University Library catalogue.   The key emphasis has been on collection storage, especially of shelved collections, with discussion of requirements for cataloguing, the Millennium system, preservation and digitisation also included.

2. Collection Storage

The Library has around 78 km of shelved collections stored on 101 km of shelving across its various locations, a shelving utilisation rate of 77% (see Table 2.1).  Although this is a healthy utilisation rate for overall collection space, various collections have a much higher shelving load including Law (94%), Cultural Collections (88%), Creswick Library (91%) and the Lenton Parr Library (87%).  The Baillieu Library currently has excess capacity from collection projects in 2012 giving it an overall rate of 79%, however following rearrangement of collections some of this capacity will be transferred to student space or other purposes so it is important that collection issues in the Baillieu Library continue to be addressed.

The University stores have received over 20 km of storage space through extension projects at both locations in the past four years taking the total shelving available to 31 km.  Of this total, 9.5 km in empty space was remaining in November 2012.  Monograph relegation projects from the Baillieu library over November 2012 – January 2013 and the transfer of East Asian journals to store were expected to reduce this available total to just under 9 km for 2013.  A significant component of the Store collection is composed of print journals now duplicated by electronic versions.

On campus library collection space is not growing at the same rate as the collection.   The major recent building development, the Giblin Eunson Library has been offset by the closure of the science branch libraries, the Engineering library, the temporary relocation of the Architecture Building and Planning library and the current redevelopment of Level One of the Eastern Resource Centre as a Student IT facility.   Currently the library expects to receive an additional 1.5% storage space when the new Architecture, Building and Planning building is completed.

Therefore, for some time the primary storage management principle employed at the University of Melbourne library is ‘one item in – one item out’ in terms of the browsable branch collections.  The Library maintains at least one copy of each work received and so disposal of multiple copies only provides for a small proportion of the collection space required to house new materials.  Duplication of collection materials accounts for between 5-25% of collections depending on the discipline.

New items added to the library catalogue from July 2010 – June 2012 in locations other than Cultural Collections locations and periodical collections were used as a surrogate measure of new material growth in the library.  This measure found that item growth in the covered locations over the two years was 46,500 items per year.  From new items added to the catalogue over the period, an estimate was made also of Cultural Collections growth of  3,270 items per year.

From these figures and an estimate for periodicals growth it is estimated that at current growth rates the Library is adding between 1.4-1.5 kilometres of shelved material per year of which 1.1-1.3 kilometres will need to be retained in long term storage (growth rate of 1.4%-1.7% of total collections).  However, increases in e-book purchases should reduce the amount added over the next six year period considerably so that the additional material to be retained may be approximately 1 kilometre a year or less.  It is still difficult to determine the magnitude that e-book purchasing will have on collection management at this time.

On this basis, it is recommended that the Library undertake projects across locations with identified shelving utilisation issues to transfer 1-1.2 kilometres to the Library stores per year to cover collection growth.  Undertaken as major projects in each location of 500-800 m of material, this would involve detailed academic consultation covering about 10% of the collection in each location once in a 5 year period.    Rearrangements of collections following collection transfers to utilise space made available could involve as much as 7 km of material for individual projects such as the rearrangements currently required for the Baillieu second and third floors.   The Eastern Resource Centre has a fairly low shelving utilisation rate and will probably not require such a project to cover collection growth in the next five years, however has been identified as a location for several collection movement projects and will have journal collections covered by electronic equivalents for transfer to store in the period.  Therefore, rearrangements of collection spaces at the Eastern Resource Centre will probably be required.

It is estimated that the library stores would be able to handle collection transfers of 1-1.2 kilometres per year for 8-9 years given current space availability.  The Bundoora store is expected to have a further expansion that would extend store space to 12-13 years of current growth.  However, most recent transfers of collections to store have been necessitated by redevelopment of collection space for other purposes and if this continues, the estimated store space availability may be drastically reduced. Collection transfers between July and November 2012 saw store space availablity reduced from 42% to 30%.

As well as shelved collections, the library maintains extensive cabinet based collections, especially in maps and microforms with collections of 130,000 individual maps and 1.7 million microform rolls and fiche.  The highest priority for these collections is identification of a suitable long term storage site for collections duplicated in digital form and other low use collections as the collections expand beyond their on-site space availability.   Both maps and microforms have limited space for additional cabinet storage in the medium term.

4. Preservation and Digitisation

Collection preservation includes actions taken on general collection items including binding, repairs, transfers to closed collections, cleaning, pest control and disaster management plans as well as preservation of fragile and special collection items.   The Cultural Collections Unit has recently established a preservation room in the Baillieu Library which is being fitted out with various equipment for preservation activities such as mould cleaning and box preparation.  It is recommended that the library establish a cleaning program for all collections, a centralised store of preservation equipment and continue to fund pest control programs and the continuing development of the preservation room and other preservation activities identified by the Cultural Collections Subcommittee.

Digitisation encompasses both purchases of material in digital format and the digitisation of existing collection items.  The Library is investing heavily in digital materials from external suppliers including back sets of academic journals and archival and audiovisual collections such as Early English Books Online and the Naxos Music Library.  The Library also manages the University Digitisation Service who undertake scanning and OCR production for University researchers, collection owners and University business requirements.  The Digitisation Service has appropriate equipment to perform it’s current scanning projects however extensive book scanning to support large scale digitisation initiatives might require investment in equipment such as the Treventus scan robot and additional file storage space.

University of Melbourne Library Branches/Collections

Each major collection storage area has been summarised with collection storage data, two year physical item growth rates, a summary of the purpose for the library and recent collection management activities.  Collection item growth varies between 1% for MSLE libraries (largely due to introduction of e-book resources) to 5% for Louise Hanson-Dyer Music Library (due to cataloguing of extensive items in the rare book collection).   Generally item growth is 3% to 4% of non-periodical collections.

As well, collection managers have supplied short term, medium term and in some cases long term priorities for collection management in their areas.  Major themes within priorities include the continuing development of electronic book collections, transfer of journals to store where supplied in electronic format, the requirement to continue cataloguing of older collections and projects to reorganise collections and integrate collections improving discipline coverage from other branches.  The Architecture, Building and Planning Library needs to reduce collection size before transferring to the new faculty building.  Baillieu Library aims to integrate research collections with its main collection.  The East Asian collection aims to reclassify it’s Harvard Yen-ching collections to Library of Congress.

Collection Subject Analysis

A detailed analysis was conducted of collection distribution (especially between branches and stores), usage and new item growth across 113 subject categories.   In most areas, the University Library has gone most of the way towards creating discipline specific collections in it's libraries, except for where similar collections occur on multiple campuses.   The individual subject reports detail extensive recommendations to improve collection management in each area with indications of the level of material required to transfer to Store to meet the criteria of "one item in - one item out" and maintain the current shelving utilisation rate.  All collection transfers to Store are subject to a period of academic consultation and approval of the Director of Collections.

Although Store recommendations have been made at a subject level in these reports, projects are usually performed across a broad part of the collection in an individual library or at an area of particular stress of running out of shelving space so that it is not necessarily expected that the numbers of items involved in a particular project would match the numbers in the recommendations.  The recommendations are made to indicate the volume of material required to be moved to match incoming new item growth requirements.

Branches vs Off campus Stores

Overall, for non-periodical subject categories which contribute material to Store or CARM, the average percentage of items held in Store/CARM was found to be currently 22% of these collections.   On the basis of item numbers the non-periodical items in the library stores represent 16.2% of all catalogue items included in the analysis, which includes various subject collections that do not transfer items to Store.  Education, Economics, Engineering, East Asian and some physical sciences have the highest level of material in Store/CARM.  Life sciences, medicine, arts, architecture, music, history, philosophy, languages and religion have the lowest levels of material in Store/CARM.

From the figures presented in the periodical sets (Set 98-110) it is estimated that Store contains 44% of the Library periodicals collections (8,670 m in Store of 19,884 m overall for Periodicals collections).  Overall, on the basis of shelved metres of material, the Stores hold 28% of University Library shelved collections (see Table 2.1).

Also on the basis of shelved metres of material, 4% of library collections have been transferred to CAVAL ownership for holding in the CARM consortium collection.  On the basis of item numbers the CARM catalogued items represent 3.2% of all catalogue item records included in this analysis.

Non-Periodical Collection Growth

Item number collection growth over the entire collection is currently occurring at approximately 2% annually for non-periodical collections.   Due to the size of the collection a 2% collection growth rate approximates to 500,000 new items in a decade.    A 2% collection growth rate also translates to a 4% annual growth rate for collections in library branches with a significant component at Store.   New item growth is continuing at between 1 and 6% for individual subject areas of the library.  All areas require constant maintenance to keep collections within non-expanding collection spaces within the branch libraries.  A constant program of transfers to Store as well as overall Store or Library expansion is required to meet these growth requirements.

Item Circulation

Approximately one third of all non-periodical items have circulated at least once in the last five years between June 2007- June 2012.  In terms of individual items circulated as a percentage of all items, high circulation areas include social science and politics, philosophy and psychology, business, architecture, TV and cinema and the Lenton Parr and Louise Hanson-Dyer audiovisual collections.

Collection areas with levels of low use items in circulating branch collections of approximately 30% or higher included religion, law, languages, botany, agriculture, literature, history and East Asian collections. A high level of non-circulating collection may be necessary due to the nature of the discipline such as history, however a combination of continuing collection growth and high levels of non-circulating items is difficult for the library to maintain when on campus library space is not expanding.  The library continues to seek to work with academics to identify suitable material in low circulation areas that is appropriate for off campus storage.

Summary of Section 1 Major Findings and Recommendations

Collection Storage

• The Library contains approximately 78 km of shelved material on 101 km of shelving at a shelf utilisation rate of 77%
• Growth of physical collections is currently occuring at approximately 45,000 items per year in the University Library non-periodical collections excluding Cultural Collections
• Growth of items to be retained in long term storage is estimated to require 1.1 to 1.3 kilometres of shelving per year, however should be reduced to around 1 kilometre per year with further purchasing of electronic resources
• There is currently rapid uptake of electronic formats replacing physical materials however it is not yet possible to determine the magnitude of impact this will have on new collection space requirements
• The Library should transfer on average 1 to 1.2 kilometres of material to Store each year to maintain a steady state with incoming material
• The Library can achieve this by conducting major projects on a number of the major collection locations each year
• Collection space made available through Store projects may need to be reassigned to collections by rearrangements of collections in major collection locations.  This may involve movement of up to seven kilometres of material for individual projects.
• Duplication rates vary widely between collection areas and may be between 4-25% of collections.  Continue handling of duplicated material in line with the University Collection Development policy
• Initiate discussions on approaches for handling duplication existing between branches and between special collections and general collections
• Library off campus stores should have space for handling collection growth for 8-9 years at the current rate of growth
• If storage collection projects are conducted over the period from 2013-2018 and the ABP collection is transferred to it's new building releasing space on Level 2 of ERC which is reutilised with collections, it is estimated that the Library Stores will have approximately 5 kilometres of storage spaceremaining at the end of 2018.  Consideration for building additional off-campus storage would be required at that time. ·      Expect growth of 80-200 m per year in Special Collections.  Utilise remaining space for existing collections.
• The Director of Collections and Curator of Special Collections will select appropriate material for off-campus Store as required.
• Continue cataloguing program for outstanding collections including the Rare Book Room, BX and McLaren collections
• Continue investigation for appropriate long term storage solution for cabinet based materials
• Consider RFID for DVD and CD collections
• Continue to centralise microform holdings at Baillieu Library
• Continue purchase of additional cabinets for maps and microforms as required