About Us

The Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust (EAST) is the collaborative effort of a large group of academic and research libraries to document, protect, and provide long-term access to their print collections. As of September 2023, EAST has over 100 member institutions in 15 states from Maine to Florida. EAST is focused on retaining unique, scarcely held, and frequently used scholarly books and journals in support of scholarship, research and teaching.

EAST member libraries commit to retain agreed upon titles in their local collections for an agreed upon period of time (currently through at least June 30, 2031) and make those titles available to other EAST members. By contributing to this collective collection, member libraries are able to consider weeding and deselection of titles locally in order to free up space for new and innovative library services.  As of September 2023, EAST member libraries have made retention commitments to over 10 million monographs and over 29,000 serials and journals titles.

Originally funded by generous grants from the Davis Educational Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, EAST is now self-supporting through annual membership dues. EAST originated as a sponsored program of the Boston Library Consortium and is now an independent 501(c)(3) incorporated in the state of Massachusetts. 

In January 2018, EAST joined the Rosemont Shared Print Alliance, a collaboration of regional programs interested in coordinating their efforts on a larger scale to ensure the retention of and access to print journal backfiles.

In 2020, EAST became one of the founding members of the Partnership for Shared Book Collections, an organization that grew out of two EAST-organized Shared Print Summits, made possible by the Mellon Foundation grant. The Partnership, a continental endeavor with representation from major monograph shared print programs, has a mission to: “Coordinate collaboration among shared print monograph initiatives and collections in North America to support cost-effective retention and access to shared print monograph collections.

 

Page last updated on September 2023.