Hi Jared, We have about 3,000 (or 20%) of our DVDs in locked cases in an open "browsing" collection. It's located in our Media Center, so it's easy to help people find items if they can't locate them on their own. These titles--Criterion, Warner, 20th Century Fox, Dreamworks, etc.,--fly off the shelves. We are planning to move more out there, partially due to lack of space in our closed collection. Theft has not been an issue: missing rate for these titles is equal to or less than our closed collection. We do circulate our media for 7 days to UW faculty/students/staff, our NW Summit partners, and via ILL.
A note about circulating vs. non-circulating: as it's our primary mission to support research and teaching at UW, we strongly encourage faculty to turn in reserve lists early and schedule their film screenings as soon as they can. Usually it takes one instance of "their" film being checked out for them to get it. We also have a pretty aggressive overdue fines regime, so that helps persuade everyone to get things turned in on time or renew (if not on hold for someone else). I do think some films should be kept in closed stacks: e.g, expensive docs, rare and unique items, films with restrictive licensing issues. Some of our unpublished materials--for example http://lib.washington.edu/media/cdc.html--are on permanent reserve/library use only. All in all, the solution one comes up with needs to be customized to fit the particulars of the collection, the mission of the institution, and the needs of the community. Good luck! John ______________ John Vallier Head, Distributed Media UW Libraries Media Center http://www.lib.washington.edu/media http://faculty.washington.edu/vallier VIDEOLIB is intended to encourage the broad and lively discussion of issues relating to the selection, evaluation, acquisition,bibliographic control, preservation, and use of current and evolving video formats in libraries and related institutions. It is hoped that the list will serve as an effective working tool for video librarians, as well as a channel of communication between libraries,educational institutions, and video producers and distributors.
