ABSTRACT

The long-standing cooperative culture within the research library community should serve as a useful foundation for building regional cooperative agreements to support repositories of print journal backfiles. Serious storage constraints facing Iowa State University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison mandated an effort to tackle this problem in a deliberative and coordinated way. An inter-institutional Task Force was formed to design and implement a process with a selected group of titles as a pilot project. The immediate goal was to liberate shelf space with an eye toward the future development of a consortial collection management plan for the storage of print journals among the three institutions.