"Print Management at 'Mega-scale'" Webinar Recording
Channel: OCLC Research
Date: 28/03/2013

In this 14 March 2013 webinar, OCLC Research Program Officer Constance Malpas and Research Scientist Brian Lavoie present findings from their report, "Print Management at "Mega-scale": a Regional Perspective on Print Book Collections in North America." The report provides insight into the characteristics of a network of regionally consolidated print collections, key relationships across these collections, and their implications for system-wide issues such as information access, mass digitization, resource sharing, and preservation of library resources. Constance and Brian explain how they utilized urbanist Richard Florida's mega-regions framework and the WorldCat bibliographic database to explore the North American print book resource as a network of regionally consolidated shared collections. The mega-regions framework enables a re-imagining of the "natural boundaries" of collection management, and offers a unique perspective on the new geography of library service provision, in which services and collections are increasingly organized "above the institution." Constance and Brian also discuss some extensions of the mega-regions work, including focused application of the mega-region framework to specific consortia contexts.