Plans to ensure that at least seven copies of every scholarly book are kept across UK libraries will help enrich research resources and safeguard rare texts rather than push institutions to downsize their collections, librarians have insisted.

UK libraries routinely remove thousands of little-used texts from their stacks each year but there are growing concerns that such pruning is not enough to cope with the arrival of new monographs and research materials, with librarians reluctant to discard books over fears that they might be unexpectedly required by researchers.

To address these worries over space and the disposal of potentially valuable rare texts, libraries have been invited to join a new initiative, known as the UK Print Book Collection (UK PBC), to help coordinate library stocktakes to ensure rare academic books are not lost.

Using Jisc’s , which contains about 160 million records for items held at 202 academic libraries, librarians will only “deaccession” a book – sell, recycle or discard it – if at least seven copies are listed by other member institutions of the UK PBC.

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The scheme, which is jointly run by Research Libraries UK, the Society of College, National and University Libraries, the British Library and Jisc, will provide much-needed reassurance for librarians struggling to find space for the new titles arriving each month, said Geoff Lewis, collections and discovery manager at the University of Warwick, which has been a pilot member of the scheme.

“Our stores are full,” said Lewis, who last month that his library’s 43.5km of shelving (which hold more than one million items) had only 100 metres of stack space left, despite his institution discarding about 5,000 library items annually.

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Allowing librarians to remove greater numbers of underused books, thanks to the coordination offered by UK PBC, would help increase the vibrancy of library collections, argued Jan Davey, collections librarian at the University of Bristol, whose one million items, including 400,000 books, occupy about 18km of shelving.

“Our research collections are not static – they ebb and flow over time,” said Davey, noting that the impact of removing 40,000 books since 2019 had been minimal, resulting in just 12 inter-library loan requests for these discarded items.

Analysis produced by the UK PBC found that the new seven copies rule would potentially allow academic libraries to reduce their stocks by between 50 and 80 per cent. However, this is regarded as the “starting point”, with staff then taking library-level decisions such as the overall popularity and use of books, the need to maintain disciplinary collections and the uniqueness of certain editions.

That level of stock reduction was highly unlikely because the scheme was principally about saving rare books, rather than encouraging institutions to manage down their stocks, said UK PBC board member Jane Saunders, associate director for content and delivery at the University of Leeds’ library.

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“No-one is being asked to throw out books – they are being asked to retain them,” she explained, adding the scheme was a “mechanism for libraries to do what they are already doing but in a coordinated way.”

“No one will be getting rid of 50 per cent of their books or even huge numbers. This is not about reducing the numbers of books that libraries hold – it’s about helping with their ongoing capacity,” continued Saunders, noting the rising costs associated with storing and managing ever-expanding collections.

“If we do not do something coordinated we are putting our collections at risk so this is a good way to safeguard those materials,” she said.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com