By Ann Snowman
DARCHIVE-P is a new location policy viewable only in WorkFlows that will be used to govern the circulating behavior of volumes comprising the PALCI Distributed Dark Archive that resides in the Libraries Annex. Penn State is the designated site to retain 46 titles published by The American Chemical Society (ACS), The American Institute of Physics (AIP) and The American Physical Society (APS) making up the archive on behalf of our PALCI consortial partners.
Through an agreement signed in 2009, Penn State Libraries will hold these 46 titles in their entirety, for the life of the agreement, allowing our partners to weed their copies and relieve crowding in their stacks. Penn State views its role in this initiative in the context of our mission as a Statewide Library Resource Center and Pennsylvania’s only land grant institution, committed to preserve Pennsylvania’s cultural record, support research and teaching, and provide services and resources to the people of the Commonwealth. These titles were selected as the initial contributions to the archive because they are ubiquitously held, and they are available digitally through trusted sources.
For the purposes of this agreement a dark archive can be described as one that does not circulate, is not available for browsing, and is accessed only if no other print or digital copy can reasonably be made available. A light archive is more accessible and available to fulfill interlibrary loan requests making it more vulnerable to loss and wear. PALCI partners Lehigh University, St. Joseph University, Dickinson College, Duquesne University, University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College, Lafayette College, Swarthmore College, Carnegie Mellon University, Temple University, West Virginia University will share responsibility for the distribution of the complementary light archive.
The agreement is intended to encompass all volumes of each title from volume 1, issue 1 through the end of the publication year 2000. While University Libraries does hold volumes beyond 2000, they are not included in the DARCHIVE-P location and will behave differently than their earlier counterparts.
Another stipulation of the agreement is to verify that no issues are missing from the archived volume. Issue –verification will be conducted by annex staff. However, the national standard for recording that information is still evolving; demonstrating just how “fresh” this type of venture is. As they discover missing issues, staff will draw from duplicate copies in Penn State’s collection first, and then call on our consortial partners to fill in the gaps. Once they have completed verification and annotated records to reflect the status of all volumes, all duplicate runs of these titles will be withdrawn from the annex. Libraries holding duplicates at locations other than the annex will be alerted to withdraw those copies as well; taking the first steps in recommendations made by the Collection Retention Policy Group to eliminate unnecessary duplication across the collection.
PALCI intends to register this small archive with OCLC and PAPR , CRL’s recently announced print archive registry. University Libraries anticipates that this initiative will serve as a test bed for future projects as we increase our participation in shared print storage ventures nationally.
Links to the PALCI agreement and the list of journals can be found on the Libraries Annexes intranet page.
Steering this project and detailing the work flow are: Valerie Allen, Barbara Coopey, Verne Neff, Trish Notartomas, Ann Snowman, Christopher Walker and Robin Waltz.
Contact Ann Snowman with questions concerning the DARCHIVE-P project: ams32@psu.edu