Open Access Kent State (OAKS)

Librarians from the 8 campus system of Kent State University came together in the early fall of 2007 to discuss ways to enhance the institution’s collection development efforts. It was agreed to begin with a subject area common to all campuses, nursing. If successful, this pilot project could be applied as a model for adding more disciplines and inspire other institutions to consider employing similar cooperative collection development methodology. To date, the 8 campus libraries have worked together to evaluate and select an ebook vendor that provides access to a collection of over 1,700 titles in nursing and allied health and have increased access to content for online nursing journals. Perhaps the most significant achievement was the creation of an approval plan profile for selecting nursing books. The libraries parceled out sections of the LC classification system for selecting book titles. In some cases, selecting responsibilities were assigned for campuses with a particular program within nursing or allied health. In other cases the selection assignments were randomly assigned. For the random assignments, books selected through this method were also randomly assigned to an “owning” campus housing the book, based on an algorithm that weighted the randomization by each campus’ financial commitment to the project—the more a campus contributed financially the more books would be housed at that campus. Throughout the 2-year process, thought was given to how this project would be employed within other similar institutions.