All,
Good afternoon from Washington, DC. As the current Chair of the ALA CORE Library Storage interest group, I wanted to report out on the recent meeting of the group at the Annual meeting in Chicago. 16 people attended the in person meeting on Sunday, July 25th at 2:30. After introductions, there was an announcement about a new open source inventory management software (IMS), a presentation and several interesting discussions.
Announcement: The Library of Congress (LC) has partnered with a community of academic libraries to conceive a new open source system for the inventory management needs of off-site storage facilities. The collaboration, led by LC along with Harvard University, The New York Public Library, ReCAP, and Yale University Library, produced a common vision and consolidated requirements for building a robust solution for high-density storage environments managing collections of millions of item. The Library of Congress will initiate a software development project based on these requirements and informed by community stakeholders in July 2023, and will release this as an Open Source inventory management system named FETCH (Finding EnvironmenT for Collected Holdings). For more information, or to get involved, please contact Cathy Martyniak, LC Collections Management Division Chief, mailto:cmartyniak@loc.gov.
Amy Boucher, the Director of Access Services at Harvard Libraries, presented an overview on the new Records Center located adjacent to the Harvard Depository.
Two lively discussions took place. The first was around conducting audits of collections in high density storage and the second touched on various methods for deduplication (aka withdraw and replace) of items stored on high bay shelving in acid free trays. Several participants had either already conducted deduplication efforts or planned them in the near future.
Please note that a presentation about a 2021 deduplication study undertaken at ReCAP will be made at the 2024 ALA CORE Library storage interest group meeting in San Diego by Ian Bogus, Director of the facility. I hope to maintain the traditional Sunday mid-afternoon time slot for this group so if you plan to attend that meeting, please make your flight reservations for later on Sunday or Monday.
Finally, a hearty thanks to Amy Boucher for agreeing to Co-chair this IG with me for 2023/2024. I hope this means more and better programming for the group over the next 12 months. Please reach out me with any questions or agenda topics for us to consider this coming year.
Happy 4th of July everyone.
Cathy
Cathy Martyniak
Chief, Collections Management Division
The Library of Congress