The long-standing cooperative culture within the research library community should serve as a useful foundation for building regional cooperative agreements to support repositories of print journal backfiles. Serious storage constraints facing Iowa State University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison mandated an effort to tackle this problem in a deliberative and coordinated way. An inter-institutional Task Force was formed to design and implement a process with a selected group of titles as a pilot project. The immediate goal was to liberate shelf space with an eye toward the future development of a consortial collection management plan for the storage of print journals among the three institutions.