UKRR: a collaborative collection management success story

It is worth noting that all the material in this paper is adapted from, and appears in greater length in, the UKRR Final Report.1 This article summarizes the achievements of the United Kingdom Research Reserve (UKRR) project, which was established in 2007 to explore whether, through collaborative documentation, preservation and deduplication of low-use print journals, it would be possible to realize benefits through the generation of space savings across the UK’s Higher Education libraries. In total, the project received £11,581,672 in funding from HEFCE (now Research England). UKRR was managed by Imperial College London in partnership with the British Library (BL) and between 2007 and 2019, 35 further libraries participated in the project. UKRR ran in three phases and has now transitioned to a service delivered by the BL which is available to libraries across the UK. During all three phases of the project, UKRR supported the processing of nearly 130,000 metres of print journal materials and enabled the release of nearly 98,000 metres of shelf space across the 36 libraries. Print copies of scarce titles were preserved, nearly 10,000 individual journal issues from 8,000 journal titles helped fill gaps in the BL’s own collection and data for over 300,000 individual journal issues was enhanced in the BL’s catalogue. When calculating the capital and recurrent value of the space released amongst the participating libraries, it is estimated that the project delivered £4.04 in savings for every £1.00 of funding received.