About WEST

The Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST) is a distributed retrospective print journal repository program serving research libraries, college and university libraries, and library consortia in the Western Region of the United States. Under the WEST program, participating libraries consolidate and validate print journal backfiles at major library storage facilities and at selected campus locations. The resulting shared print archives ensure access to the scholarly print record and allow member institutions to optimize campus library space. This collaborative regional approach to managing library collections represents an important step, when joined with other initiatives, toward development of a network-level shared print archive. For more information about WEST, visit WEST website.

About AGUA

AGUA is a web based service that provides key collection data to the Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST) and UC Libraries Shared Print Initiative. AGUA supports WEST's efforts to identify and secure retention commitments for titles that are highly duplicated across member institutions as well as titles that are at risk for permanent content loss due to a lack of electronic access points by gathering and synthesizing data from member institutions and outside sources. WEST's collection model is rooted in data-driven decision making, calculating risk based on a combination of criteria, identifying optimal candidates for archiving through overlap analysis across member holdings, and dictating what actions should be taken during archiving to strengthen the reliability and accuracy of the collections. By automating much of the analysis process WEST is able to perform this analytical work at scale, ingesting holdings from dozens of members and outside sources and making proposals to the member institution with the deepest holdings and optimal storage conditions. WEST is also able to facilitate collaborations between members to fill gaps in archived collections by comparing member holdings and highlighting these connections in reports produced as a result of the AGUA analysis.

For more information about using AGUA, see the AGUA User Manual.

Contact WEST

Contact the WEST Support Team with any questions or comments, or if you need assistance.