From a new report from OCLC Research, Cloud-sourcing Research Collections: Managing Print in the Mass-digitized Library Environment:
The objective of the project was to examine the feasibility of outsourcing management of low-use print books held in academic libraries to shared service providers, including large-scale print and digital repositories (8).
From the conclusion:
Our year-long study of the mass-digitized book corpus in the HathiTrust Digital Library and parallel investigation of potential shared print service providers has confirmed that there is an opportunity for significant library space savings and cost avoidance if management operations for digitized books are deliberately and systematically outsourced or externalized to shared service providers (64).
