Leveraging Preservation Practices During Large Scale Relocation and De-duplication

Ohio University Libraries has embarked on a project funded by an LSTA grant which will identify and relocate 40,000 of its scarcely-held and locally significant holdings. Currently stored in the Southeast Ohio Regional Library Depository, these items will be moved to a vendor based storage facility 80 miles from Ohio University’s main campus. The goal of this project is to pre-emptively address the long-term retention and preservation of the Libraries’ most distinct collections in the face of budget reductions for the state depository system. In this paper we will discuss how the grant focus on unique collections surfaced gaps in the Libraries’ collection management strategy, the resultant limitations on data driven analysis, as well as the preservation and retention implications of identifying and moving large numbers of scarce and sometimes unique monographs so far from users. The primary focus of the paper is the Ohio University Historic Book Project (HBP) which grew in response to the challenges posed by the grant project and the anticipated funding reduction.