Retention and access are key to any shared print initiative such as EAST. Through the detailed collection analysis, the 170+ EAST Member libraries have agreed to retain more than 11 million scholarly holdings in their local collections and make these titles available to students, scholars, faculty and researchers at other EAST libraries through standard inter-library loan. The libraries have agreed to a 15-year retention period, through June 2031, which may be extended.
In order to identify titles that have been committed for retention, the EAST 583 Working Group developed documentation to allow the member libraries to update their local catalogs with retention commitments. Recording of retention commitments is also done in standard national and regional catalogs including OCLC’s Shared Print Registration Service and, for serials and journals, the Center for Research Libraries’ PAPR database. EAST has additional documentation on working with retention commitments on the Member Resources page.
To ease discovery of EAST retention commitments as registered in OCLC, OCNs may be searched from the eastlibraries.org homepage. See also OCLC’s “Functionality Across Services” document for examples of how to search within OCLC products. A Google Sheets add-on is also available for searching via the OCLC discovery or metadata API.
EAST commitments are also viewable in the Gold Rush Library Content Comparison System. Logins are available to EAST members by contacting the EAST Program Team.