PAPR Now Offers Comparison Reports

Monday, October 7, 2013
Contact: 
Amy Wood - awood@crl.edu

CRL’s Print Archives Preservation Registry (PAPR) is a registry of print archives and shared print programs and a database of titles and holdings preserved by those programs. PAPR provides detailed information about program agreements and conditions of archiving, with 31 programs registered to date. In October 2013 the database had approximately 45,000 records (and growing) covering 32 subject areas from twelve programs. The two major contributing programs were the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology with 20,000 records and the Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST) with 11,000.

Comparison reports are a new feature of PAPR. Since PAPR went live in August 2012, users have been able to download lists of titles and holdings from various programs. Now users can submit a list of titles and holdings from their own collection and receive, in less than 24 hours, a spreadsheet showing which of their titles and holdings are committed (as reported in PAPR) to an existing print archive or shared print program. Users can specify that the comparison be run against the entire database or selected archive programs.

The University of Rochester recently used the reports to compare its JSTOR holdings and other titles in its collection with holdings already in the database. The university provided CRL a list of ISSNs from titles of interest and received a spreadsheet listing the following information for all titles represented in PAPR:

  • ISSN (the point of comparison)
  • Title (title on the TCN spreadsheet)
  • Archiver (oclc symbol)
  • Archiving Institution
  • Archived title (title as it appears in PAPR)
  • Archived publisher (publisher as it appears in PAPR)
  • Archived holdings (These correspond to the archiving institution on the same row. If multiple institutions are archiving the same title, each archiver and its holdings will appear on separate rows.)
  • Gap summary (These are gaps explicitly reported. Some archivers do not report these explicitly, but may report them implicitly in the holdings statements.)
  • Condition summary (These are conditions issues explicitly reported. Some holdings may have condition issues not reported)
  • Archiving program (Information about the programs listed can be found in the registry part of PAPR at http://papr.crl.edu/ )
  • Date of action (Date the material was archived or declared archived)
  • Date disclosed (Date the records were loaded to PAPR)

Titles with no match in PAPR were listed with no information.

This information was then merged with local information, including circulation data, and is being used to bolster collection development decisions and pkanning.

For more information about the PAPR comparison reports, please contact Amy Wood at awood@crl.edu.