The Book Traces Project: Implications for Shared Print Collections

In 2014, UVA was awarded a CLIR Hidden Collections grant to examine the Library’s pre-1923 items in our circulating collections. The goal of the project was to develop a protocol for identifying, describing and preserving evidence of past readership in our books located in the circulating collections. Project staff hoped to develop both a model and a conversation to have with other institutions about what makes a book unique, how to identify and describe those unique features, and why those books might be worthy of preservation. This presentation, given at the Print Archive Network Meeting on June 23, 2017, discusses our results to date as well as discusses the implications for shared print repositories, and institutions considering catalog-diven weeding and deduping projects.