The Libraries recently completed a large-scale project to ensure unique library materials remain available thanks to a partnership with library consortium EAST. The Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust (EAST) is a shared print initiative involving 60+ academic and research libraries in 11 states from Maine to Florida. EAST is focused on retaining unique, scarcely held, and frequently used scholarly monographs and serials in support of scholarship, research, and teaching.
In 2023, the South Carolina academic library consortium PASCAL joined EAST to ensure unique and scarcely held titles in South Carolina’s academic libraries remained available for lending. To conduct this work, 17 academic libraries in South Carolina (including Furman) were sent lengthy lists of their unique and scarcely held print books and were asked to search the stacks for them.
If you visited the library in late spring or early summer, you likely saw pairs of library employees wandering the stacks reciting call numbers to one another. This was the EAST project in action. By the July 5th, 23 volunteers (both full-time and student library employees) reviewed 20,488 individual print books across all three libraries. This hard work resulted in Furman committing to retain 91,632 titles. Furman is committing to keep these unique and scarcely held titles in their collections not only for the benefit of our own Furman patrons, but also for library users across the world who will be able to access our materials through Interlibrary Loan.
