Collection Analysis Services. Many shared print initiatives will require investigations into the composition and use of collections in order to make retention decisions. Although collection analysis is one important method to identify holdings to preserve, it’s not the only one. Some alternate strategies include declaring all volumes already in high-density storage as "retained" or libraries volunteering to retain certain programmatically important collections. The required levels of collection analysis services vary greatly depending on the scope of the initiative. Some initiatives may choose to use in-house staff to conduct the data wrangling required for collection analysis support, possibly combined with the role of systems librarian. Others will want to use external collection analysis products and services. For in-depth collection analysis, particularly across multiple libraries and library systems, commercial vendor support is essential. There are currently only a limited number of tools and services available to support the group-wide analysis of print monographs. The most common type of analysis tools ingest local bibliographic and/or usage data from multiple systems and return synthesized results. OCLC’s Collection Evaluation is an example of this ‘self-service’ model, which uses member libraries’ already loaded information. At the time of writing, the group functionality for Collection Evaluation has not been released. These services have certain set reports for displaying the data and require member libraries’ work in manipulating and interpreting the results. For initiatives that would rather have a service perform the data manipulation for them, Sustainable Collection Services 8(SCS) are the only service at 8 xxxx://xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx/ the time of writing that provides a combination of data reporting and in-depth consulting support to facilitate the difficult decision-making process required in groups making retention decisions.
