PALMPrint: Lessons Learned From a Shared Print Collection

PALMPrint (Preserving America’s Legal Materials in Print) is a jointly-owned, shared print collection of U.S. federal and state primary legal materials. This 3-year pilot project began in 2013 as a joint effort of the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) and NELLCO Law Library Consortium, Inc. (NELLCO). The goal of developing a proof-of-concept model for the collaborative retention of and access to primary U.S. legal materials has been achieved, and PALMPrint became a permanent entity in 2016. The collection is housed in the high-density storage facility of William B. Meyer, Inc., located in Windsor, CT. PALMPrint has been a highly collaborative project from the outset, with a joint advisory committee engaged in creating a collection development plan, establishing a funding model, identifying institutions that were willing to donate portions of their print collection to the repository, marketing the project, recruiting subscribers, and selecting a storage facility. The project coordinators from LIPA and NELLCO worked with the Meyer staff to build a simple interface for discovery and retrieval of items. This paper does not recap every step of the evolution of PALMPrint but instead addresses the lessons learned along the way, both what we got right and what we might have done differently had we known then what we know now. It also describes the work of the PALMPrint Futures Committee, which is helping to create the blueprint for the transition from a pilot project to a permanent repository.