Australia's National Research Collection: Overlap, Uniqueness, And Distribution‪.‬

This paper presents the most recent findings of an ongoing study investigating the overlap, uniqueness, and distribution of print collections held in Australian research libraries. The goal of the study is to better understand the distribution of legacy print material amongst Australian research libraries in order to assess the potential for future collaboration in aspects of collection development and collection management. This includes collection development (selection and acquisitions), storage, disposal, and last copy retention. There is a particular focus on storage, and on the potential for creating forms of federated storage that reduce costs for the network of Australian research libraries and produce efficiencies in the discovery and delivery of legacy print items (Genoni, 2007; Genoni, 2008). An important research method in achieving the goals of the project has been the use of studies of overlap and uniqueness amongst Australia's research collections. Results have been produced (Genoni & Varga, 2009) that supplement those obtained from previous similar studies (Australian Research Libraries Collection Analysis Project, 2004; Missingham & Walls, 2003). Each of these previous overlap studies have identified both the degree of duplication between collections and the incidence and distribution of uniquely held items for sections of the Australian research library community. While generating useful data, these studies have, however, been restricted in scope and utility by the limited functionality of the bibliographic services and software at their disposal. The primary source of data used has been the National Bibliographic Database (NBD), in the form of Libraries Australia and its predecessors. This service has not been well equipped with either the software or staff support necessary for deep mining of overlap data. As a result, previous Australian overlap studies have been limited to a subset of the university libraries and the National Library, and had limited flexibility in manipulating data.