Curating Collective Collections - ReCAP, Centralized Book Housing, and the Economy of Shared Collections, or, From Book Barn to Service Center

摘要

Since the Harvard Depository and the University of California Regional Library Facilities opened in the 1980s, there has been a steady increase in the number of dedicated library collection storage facilities. They all serve an essential role in allowing libraries to continue collecting through the simple expedient of giving their builders a place to put things, but their utilization as a sort of second-class stacks needs reconsideration. Changing the way we think about this infrastructure gives us an opportunity to leverage the affordances of this infrastructure to dramatically improve the level of service and comprehensiveness of access we offer to readers across the United States. Our initial vision of these facilities - as closed stack, second-tier storage in an era when print was the only available information channel - made them more of a necessary compromise than something intrinsically desirable. They were not reader adjacent like the open stacks seemed to be, and this remoteness shaped their service model to emphasize rapid delivery on request as an approximation of walking into the stacks.