Frequently Asked Questions about Retention Commitments

EAST Memorandum of Understanding section 5.1 :

"Retention Partners agree not to sell, discard, donate, or otherwise relinquish ownership or control of any of the retained materials prior to the end of the Retention Period, except to transfer materials to another EAST Retention Partner or with permission of the Executive Committee."

Therefore, if the shared storage facility is an EAST Retention Partner (e.g. the Five Colleges) and extends lending to all EAST members, materials can be transferred. Retention commitments should be updated in the 583 fields in the local ILS of the receiving institution, perhaps adding a 561 field to denote the original holder of the material. Shared print LHRs in OCLC will also need to be updated, removing the retention from the donating library and registering the retention with the receiving facility.*

Local ILS: It is the responsibility of individual member libraries to have a process for recording retention commitments in their local catalogs. See the EAST 583 Working Group site for guidance on using the MARC 583 field in holdings records for this purpose. EAST does not need to be informed about retention commitments being transferred to different copies of the same title with the same OCLC number.

NOTE: If a library is moving a retention to a better OCLC record, move the Shared Print LHR to the new record. This will effectively register the retention commitment on the new record. Not that deleting and adding a new LHR does NOT register the commitment, nor set the Shared Print flag in OCLC.*

The acceptability of replacing an older item with a newer edition is highly dependent on the materials being replaced. Out of scope materials need not have a retention commitment (see FAQ scope question). If the material is in scope, please refer to the Replacing Editions document for examples of what is and is not acceptable.

Note: If the new edition is an electronic edition, please retain the older print edition.

Every effort should be made to replace missing material with the same edition, including from another EAST Retention Partner. This is especially important if the edition has any unique characteristics such as prefaces and/or commentary. Artifactual copies of the title are always preferred, but print facsimiles are acceptable. It is only acceptable to transfer the commitment to a different edition of the title in situations where the retention copy is missing, there isn’t another copy of the same edition available within EAST, or the material is determined to be equivalent. We are trusting members to use their professional judgement in determining if a different edition is functionally equivalent for the retention commitment.

It is also acceptable to do this with a holding with a different publication date or publisher when necessary, following the guidelines above. Please see the Operating Procedure: Replacing Lost or Damaged Items with Retention Commitments document for further information.

Note that EAST Retention Partners may already hold several editions of the same title, and/or have several holdings already retained on a specific edition. If you are tranfering a commitment to a new edition AND that new addition already has at least 5 retentions on it, you may simply revoke your current retention commitment.*

Libraries can use the EAST Gold Rush database for this information and to conduct additional collection analyses. Please contact info@eastlibraries.org for login information and instructions.

EAST retentions are also recorded in OCLC and are visible in FirstSearch, Connexion, and Collections Manager to search shared print commitments, as well as visible via the search on the homepage of eastlibraries.org.

Please report these materials to EAST. EAST will work with the Retention Library to attempt to secure another commitment on a non-facsimile circulating print copy. If that is not possible EAST will ask the holding library to retain the current commitment on the circulating facsimile to enable preservation access to this intellectual content.

Retained holdings for Photocopies should be removed from original print records to a separate bibliographical record for the reproduction format, which should include a 533 with the text “Print reproduction”.

The 583 should reflect that this is a reproduction. Include a second 583 with the subfield ‘a’ completeness reviewed, and a subfield ‘l’ of “Facsimile”. The date in subfield ‘c’ should be the date the item was last reviewed. Optionally a subfield 'z' can be added to note which sections of the materials are facsimiles. See the OCLC Detailed metadata guidelines for more examples.

583 1# $a completeness reviewed $c 20190614 $f EAST $l Facsimile $5 MeWC

Partners that identify categories of materials they determine to be out of scope, e.g. textbooks, handbooks, manuals, ephemera (see scope definition) may request the removal of their retention commitment using the EAST Reversal and Reallocation Requests Form.* See also the “Revoking Retention Commitments Determined to be Out of Scope” section of the EAST Major Operating Policies.

Occasionally, a library may hold material that they believe to be out of scope for EAST, which is not listed in the current scope and ephemera definitions. In such instances if the library wishes to revoke the retention commitment, it is requested that they consult with the EAST Program Team, who may consult the EAST Operations Committee, to determine if the materials should be added to the out of scope definition.

If the material is determined by the Program Team to be in scope, libraries should determine the number of existing EAST commitments on the title using the EAST retentions search, and the scarcity of the title in WorldCat. If the title is not retained elsewhere and/or is not widely available in the U.S., it is requested that the library consider retaining the material, and if they are unwilling to do so, that they agree to relinquish the title to a retention partner who is willing to commit to retain the item.

While retention data can be updated in OCLC quite easily at any time, updating Gold Rush is more cumbersome. Since changes to retention data are infrequent, EAST only asks for updated data once per year. Beginning in 2023, this request for updated data will be in the late spring. If your library would like to update data at any other time, they are welcome to do so. Additions to retentions can be added by depositing their marc records in the Gold Rush ftp site, while deletions require an entire reload of marc records for all retained items. Gold Rush has some guidelines for depositing marc records, or contact the us at info@eastlibraries.org you need additional assistance.

In general EAST prefers that original material be retained if at all possible. However, we recognize that this is not always possible in the case of deteriorating materials. Usually we would ask that the library submit these materials for reallocation, but given the likelihood of all copies of the era being in poor conditions, we request that the library attempt to purchase a modern reprint and move the retention to that new OCLC #.

As for HathiTrust public domain copies, if the library is willing to do validation of the digital surrogate against the print it may be possible for that to stand in place of materials that are too damaged to retain. As of spring 2021 we are still in the process of investigating and documenting the procedures for this. Please contact us for more information.

Yes, it is expected that missing items that you’ve committed to retain for EAST will be replaced. If the item is able to be replaced with a copy with the same OCLC number there is no need to report the change. If an item is replaced by a different edition, please be sure to update OCLC to have your commitment on the correct record.

While replacing the missing title holdings is the preferred route, if there are items your library can not to replace due to cost or availability, please follow the semi-annual reallocation process.  All changes to EAST retentions should be reported using the EAST Reallocations Request Form.

EAST retained items should be available for circulation to other EAST members, but we understand that there may be times when an item is required to be placed on reserve. We ask that in situations where you also own a second copy you consider not placing this copy on reserve.

If a title has a history of being on reserve, will be on reserve for longer than a semester, on permanent reserve, or is likely to be a candidate for reserve in the future, you should consider not de-accessioning additional copies or investigating whether it’s possible to find a replacement retention copy, including from another EAST Retention Partner.

The Partnership for Shared Book Collections is a federation of monograph shared print programs in the U.S. and Canada. The Partnership’s mission is to ensure the long-term preservation of, access to, and integrity of monographic print resources. A full list of members is available on their website, sharedprint.org, and includes EAST, HathiTrust, and SCELC.

EAST representatives sit on the Partnership's Executive Committee and Operations Committee.

The Partnership develops and maintains a set of Best Practices, offers educational webinars, and has developed a robust research agenda to benefit the Shared Print community.

We encourage anyone interested in issues related to shared print to contact the Partnership (info@sharedprint.org) about opportunities to serve on one of the Partnership’s working groups.

It depends. U.S. federal government documents are out of scope for EAST and retention commitments on these titles can be revoked. Other programs are addressing retention and preservation of these documents.

State, local, and international government or quasi-government titles are not explicitly out of scope and they may not have the protection of other programs. When possible, we recommend member libraries keep the retention commitments already in place for these items.

The Rosemont Shared Print Alliance is 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. The current participants are the:

Big Ten Academic Alliance Shared Print Repository (CICBTAA-SPR)
Center for Research Libraries (CRL)
Eastern Academic Scholars' Trust (EAST)
Florida Academic Libraries Repository (FLARE)
Scholars Trust
​Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST)

EAST representatives sit on the Rosemont Operations Committee and Executive Committee. For a description of Rosemont’s goals and activities see the Alliance’s Strategic Directions.

No, replacement is not required for these material types, but EAST members are encouraged to donate their copies to Retention Partners to help fill gaps and should always inform the EAST Program Team when a title or volume is no longer being retained.

Per EAST policy, EAST members are expected to record their commitments in their local ILS (guidance for adding commitments is available in EAST Member Resources). Consult with your local Technical Services staff on how to identify retained material in your ILS.

EAST commitments are also recorded in the Print Archives and Preservation Registry (PAPR), alongside commitments from the major shared print programs in North America, including our fellow Rosemont Shared Print Alliance members. Note that PAPR also hosts a Collection Comparison Tool which allows for an upload of a list of local record numbers to generate an instant comparison with the PAPR archived titles registry.

Retention commitments are also visible in OCLC's Connexion, Record/Collection Manager, FirstSearch and various APIs. See the "Functionality across services" doc for descriptions of how to find Shared Print in each of these services.

No, we understand that it’s not feasible for all EAST members to carry out such work. However, based on the experiences of those libraries that have carried out shelf checks it can be useful to confirm that you actually own a title you are committing to retain, that the physical holdings match those recorded in the ILS (and submitted for the collection analysis), and material is in a usable/readable condition. Validation levels can be recorded in the 583 field.

Guidance for carrying out validation (both at the volume and issue level) can be found in our Member Resources.

Titles available in JSTOR are out of scope for EAST Serials Retentions, so your institution is not obligated to retain these titles in print on behalf of EAST, unless your institution has explicitly decided to do so, e.g. the Five Colleges Inc. You may remove retention commitments from OCLC for these titles, and notify EAST that they should be removed from PAPR. Note that not all libraries have access to all collections in JSTOR.

We encourage you to use the CRL Comparison Tool to identify any gaps in the CRL, Harvard or University of California JSTOR print archives that you may be able to fill. Alternatively, you may send a list of items from JSTOR titles that you plan to deaccession to Nahid Vand (Nahid.Vand@ithaka.org) or John Kiplinger (John.Kiplinger@ithaka.org) for review.  They will attempt to review lists as promptly as possible, but depending upon the time of year, workloads, size of lists, etc., some turnarounds may be faster than others. Note that they are willing to take issues that fill existing gaps, not entire runs of a journal.