Consortial Shared Print Archiving: Perspectives from Canada

It has been well documented that the emergence of a stable body of electronic text is transforming the utility of legacy print collections in academic libraries (Schonfeld, 2009; Kieft, 2012; ARL, 2012). This is certainly true for journals and increasingly appears to be affecting the management of monograph collections as well (Lavoie and Schonfeld, 2006; Demas, 2012). Combined with pressure for the repurposing of space in university libraries, and the acceptance of online reading by researchers, this shift is pushing collection managers toward consideration of historical print collections on an entirely new scale (Lavoie et al., 2012; Malpas, 2011). As the authors of the ARL statement on 21st Century collections put it, “Twenty-first-century collection management will therefore require increased collaboration within and among institutions...A multi-institutional approach is the only one that now makes sense ” (Association of Research Libraries, 2012, p. 1). The Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL) is a consortium of 23 university libraries in the four western provinces of Canada. Spanning 1.1 million square miles yet with only 10 million residents, the region’s vast geography has been a driver for cooperation. In 2011, after several years of planning and study, 19 member libraries responded by forming the Shared Print Archive Network (SPAN) in our region. The origins of this program have been documented elsewhere (Bird and Ashoughian, 2012; Wong, 2012). This paper focuses on how SPAN fits into larger national and global frameworks of related activity. Looking at curren