Note: This page refers to EAST’s print monograph projects. See the Serials and Journals page for the scope of those projects.
EAST aims to retain all unique and scarcely held print monograph materials, and sufficient copies of widely held materials to assure preservation and access. While initially EAST only considered titles published before 2011, this has been extended to cover titles published through 2021. Libraries may also proactively add retentions on newer titles. See the EAST retention models for further details on retention models used in collection analysis. Note that while EAST focuses on the retention of print monographs in circulating collections, some libraries may opt in to retaining non-circulating special collections monographs if they can be made available digitally.
The below material is out of scope for EAST retention which means members can remove commitments to these titles. If you do remove commitments please send a list of titles to the EAST Program Manager (samato@eastlibraries.org) so the EAST Program Team can see if it needs to refine EAST’s definition of out of scope. Please also remove the commitments from your local ILS and OCLC (if a member):
- Reference materials (e.g. handbooks, almanacs, dictionaries)
- Computer manuals and guides
- Leisure materials such as travel and hobby guides
- Juvenile literature (up to the library if they wish to retain)
- Test prep materials (e.g. LSAT, GRE)
- Legal casebooks and selected statutes
- Outdated and superseded editions of medical, consumer, and legal material. For questions about editions, please see Replacing Editions.
- Textbooks, casebooks, study guides, and instructional materials
- Theses
- Scores
- Maps
- Loose leaf material
- Government documents – both U.S. and international (United Nations documents may optionally be included)
- All non print formats, e.g. e-books, microforms, audio/video materials and other media (including accompanying media such as floppy discs & CD-ROMs).
To proactively identity out of scope material please see the detailed list of EAST ephemera (pdf), a ‘tips’ document for identifying potentially suspect or out of scope materials (pdf) and a full list of all publishers reviewed to date (xlsx) (pdf)
Last updated: April 2026