EAST’s first set of collection analysis was carried out in 2015 and focused on the print monograph collections of its 40 founding members, which totaled more than 16 million title-holdings. The EAST Project Team and Monographs Working Group worked with the collection analysis vendor OCLC Sustainable Collection Services® (SCS) and their online analytics tool GreenGlass® to agree on a set of retention rules that were approved by the EAST membership and Executive Committee. In 2017, EAST welcomed a second cohort of 12 libraries to go through a monograph collection analysis, again working with SCS, 9 million title holdings were analyzed.
The combined retention models resulted in approximately nine million title-holdings being allocated to EAST Retention Partners for the minimum 15 year retention period. Quite an accomplishment!
Since 2019, EAST has offered options for libraries that wish to join individually or as part of an already established consortium or system, and as of 2022 EAST has over 10 million title holdings retained. See more statistics about the collective collection on the Purpose and History page.
Collection Analysis for 2011-2021 Titles
In early 2024 EAST is undertaking an updated collection analysis with 67 member libraries to analyze titles published or acquired between 2011-2021. Read more about this work on the EAST Collection Analysis of 2011-2021 titles page.
Data Collection and Analysis
EAST’s monograph retention efforts are focused on circulating collections that are readily accessible to member libraries. Therefore, non-circulating materials such as special collections, government documents, and serials and journals have been considered out of scope for both sets of monograph analysis.
Working with OCLC Sustainable Collection Services® (SCS) and the EAST Project Team, the participating libraries extracted bibliographic and item level ILS data for in-scope titles (link to most current iteration of Scope/Ephemera document). The data was submitted to SCS who normalized it and created the EAST collective collection which was then loaded into the SCS online tool, GreenGlass™. Each of the EAST libraries participating in the collection analysis was provided a logon to GreenGlass™ which provided them access to visualizations of and modeling tools for their local monograph collection as well as the full EAST collective collection of holdings.
For both the original 2015-2016 Cohort 1 analysis and subsequent 2017 Cohort 2, analysis working groups were appointed by the Executive Committee to work with the EAST Project Team and staff from SCS to analyze the EAST collective collection and build a retention model for the retention of titles across EAST. The online tool provided by SCS, GreenGlass®, greatly facilitated this process as it incorporates a model builder that allows users to specify particular characteristics of the collective collection as well as aspects of the comparison of the collection to the collections of other comparator groups and determine, based on these rules, how many titles need to be retained. GreenGlass provides visualizations and other representations that allowed the EAST libraries to better understand the collective collection, particularly in terms of uniqueness and overlap as well as usage. The model builder was used by EAST to experiment with various retention modeling scenarios and determine what the impact of any particular model would be on the group as a whole and on each participating library.
The development of the models was an iterative process with feedback on the models sought from the EAST membership essential in understanding what their thoughts were on the definitions of overlap, uniqueness, and usage that the model was utilizing.
The Cohort 1 retention model was approved by the EAST Executive Committee in June 2016, with the Cohort 2 retention model approved in December 2017.
The retention models for monographs are available in the Retention Models page.
Collection Analysis Options
Libraries considering joining EAST on their own, or as part of an established group, have the option to use Gold Rush (from the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries) or Green Glass (from OCLC) as their analysis tool. Matthew Revitt, EAST’s Shared Print Consultant, created a Comparison of GreenGlass and Gold Rush which may be useful.
Libraries may join at any time, carry out collection analyses against the existing EAST collection, and make retention commitments that align with their priorities while enhancing the collective EAST collection.