This article is more than 5 years old.

After the lita top tech trends panel I decided to head over to the off site storage interest group to find out how other institutions are approaching storage.

I had the pleasure of running into Emily Stanbaugh who worked at WFU back in 2005. She is currently the shared print manager at California Digital Library. She gave a presentation about the WEST archive which is taking a slightly different approach to copy of record archiving by updating holdings in OCLC. The WEST archive is positioned to involve 80 libraries using a distributed storage model. Emily recounted the approach to archiving that the west consortium is looking towards which appears to be based on factors such as existing digital access and need for preservation.

She also discussed the cloudsourcing project funded in part by OCLC. The project investigated whether or not a collection of print and digitally stored holdings support a library that was not primarily affiliated. There are some interesting reports that I will post the links to. In general the report indicated that a small number of print repositories can provision most print resources at research libraries. Emily suggested that there are opportunities to expand the role of storage facilities In this sort of environment.