Building Preservation: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Stacks Assessment

Abstract

This article discusses the results of two collection assessments conducted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The library s Preservation Committee completed the first assessment and reported its results in College & Research Libraries in 1989. The second assessment was completed in 2002 and accompanies the institution’s initiative to establish the library’s first centralized preservation and conservation program. Both assessments focused on the central stacks collection, a repository collection serving the institution’s forty-two branch and departmental libraries. Although a reanalysis of the first assessment s data was impossible, the authors attempted to draw comparisons between the two assessments’ results. After thirteen years without a preservation program and without any significant facilities improvements, the results provide insight into the results of deferred collections care and facilities maintenance and offer guidance for conducting similar studies with other research library collections.

Condition Survey of the Circulating Collection: Joseph Anderson Cook Memorial Library, University Of Southern Mississippi

“…Ultimately, it does not matter how the sample is identified as long as it is random and representative of the population. A typical example is demonstrated by Teper and Atkins (2003), where they generate a random number for the floor, section, shelf, and item on the shelf counting left to right (p.213). Often, additional numbers beyond the sample size need to be generated due to random numbers that do not correspond to a sample item.…”

“…In addition to the Teper and Atkins (2003) study at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the core studies for comparison data are Walker, Greenfield, Fox and Simonoff (1985) at Yale University; Nainis and Bedard (1986) at Georgetown University; Bond, DeCarlo, Henes and Snyder (1987) at Syracuse University; Baird, Krentz and Schaffner (2003) at the University of Kansas; Mead and Baird (2003) at the University of Kansas; and Starmer and Rice (2004) at the University of Tennessee. The lack of consistency in designing these surveys leads to some difficulty in comparison, but the following table, Table 2 on the following page, of primary findings from these studies is useful.…”

“…At The University of Southern Mississippi, books that would be found in these two types of collections are housed together in Cook Library. Because they represent similar core collections, the details regarding physical damage, acidity, and brittleness that Teper and Atkins (2003) review in their study of the main library stacks will be used for comparison with the results from Cook Library. The study by Ward and Teper (2005) found that the undergraduate collection was in terrible condition with extensive damage to the exterior and interior parts of the books.…”

“…The survey size was significantly large enough to decide whether an additional, larger survey should be conducted by the library, or if additional mitigation efforts to stabilize and further repair the collection should begin. Historically, the condition survey has a solid foundation and has shown the power to formulate new policies, increase preservation funding, establish preservation programs, increase the number of preservation personnel, and even build new buildings to house library collections (Brown, 2006;Teper and Atkins, 2003).…”

“…A common sampling technique called stratification (Chrzastowski, et al, 1989;Mead and Baird, 2003;Teper and Atkins, 2003;Nickerson, 1992;Walker, Greenfield, Fox, and Simonoff, 1985) occurs in different variations (collections, processes, floors, subject areas, and buildings, respectively) in major articles and throughout the preservation survey literature. Stratification allows for more accurate samples to be selected by creating sub-groups (strata) that are more homogenous then the entire population.…”