Deaccession and Cancelation
Like the acquisition process, the decisions to remove items from the University’s collection shall be made in context of Libraries’ core mission within the constraints of budget and space. Considerations for the potential impact and the integrity of the total collection should be weighed, rather than strictly on concerns over space, usage and datedness. Given the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of scholarship, candidates for deaccession should be known to subject librarians and faculty well in advance for their assessment and feedback before any decisions are made.
Cancellations of electronic resources are driven primarily by budget. Any lack of historic usage, overlapping resources and low-cost alternative contents are key criteria in evaluation.
Examples of deaccession of physical materials may include:
- Disintegrating physical copy that is beyond repair or replacement
- An obsolete format that is no longer supported by the University
- Item with electronic duplication with perpetual ownership and/or access
- Multiple copies of low-use titles across multiple UCF library locations
- Items widely held and readily accessible to UCF users via interlibrary loan
- Isolated volumes evaluated as having limited scholarly value
Please note that items unique or not widely held by other libraries and the original format itself has artefactual or scholarly value may be considered as exceptions to the above and therefore, may be retained.
Preservation, Replacement and Repair
The UCF Libraries does not have the budget nor expertise on preservation for the physical items in the general collections. Conscious efforts are made at purchasing and storing items with good quality and proper environment. For licensed electronic resources, a third party archiving service is subscribed to preserve the long-term access.
Materials that are declared lost or missing, or in poor/unusable condition will be replaced at the discretion of the appropriate librarian, in accordance with the collection development policies in effect at that time. Factors described above that may influence decisions to deaccession materials from the general collection may well apply to a decision to instead replace materials due to their physical condition or lost/missing status.