1
COLLABORATION
The Master Key to Unlocking Twenty-First Century Library Collections
Karla L. Strieb
The nature and function of library collections continue to evolve in response to the emerging online environment. Rapidly developing digital library collections exert powerful transformative pressures on libraries’ print collections. Yet collections are not simply shifting from print to digital. Instead, they are diversifying, embracing a wider range of formats, and supporting more kinds of uses. New strategies for managing both print and digital collections should reflect the understanding that print content will play a different role in complex ecosystems than it does in isolated print monocultures. In turn, although digital collections will sometimes mirror print collections, they increasingly will expand to encompass new forms free from print’s limitations.
This new environment challenges many of the shared assumptions about collections that underpinned library professionals’ twentieth-century consensus regarding best practices. Collection building strategies, collection management practices, access policies, and resource sharing arrangements that were state of the art in the pre-digital world are no longer sustainable or acceptable. Dempsey, Malpas, and Lavoie argue that the network context is shifting the boundaries of organizations and collections, thus motivating a range of reconfigurations in library infrastructures.1 Cooperative strategies are highly incentivized by perceived economies of scale for both print and digital collections. Progress in collaboration around either print or digital collections can initiate a shift in management of the other. Institutions are constantly searching for opportunities to coordinate between local activities and the networks in which they participate. As a result, management of collections occurs at multiple levels—both within the institution and above the institutional level. While this complexity often requires new thinking and resource investments, it also promises to make collections more valuable to users and offers new efficiencies for libraries. This volume collectively addresses the challenges of learning how to operate cooperatively and to reorganize and repurpose past investments.
THE CASE FOR SCALE
One of the shared imperatives of collection management in a digital age is reconfiguring collections to function effectively within, and contribute to, new architectures of scale.2 This impetus to scale collections is analogous to drivers Wheeler and Hilton describe in the realm of information technology.3 In considering different strategies for institutions to move to scales above the institutional level, they offer a helpful distinction between communities of cooperation and communities of collaboration.
Communities of cooperation are formed around shared principles and shared aspirations, but individual members fundamentally retain their autonomy.
Communities of collaboration are bound together by a shared and fairly specific vision. Participants in communities of collaboration embrace intentional interdependence as instrumental to their individual success. These communities are built on principles of shared investment and coordinated action designed to achieve mutually desired outcomes within a defined period of time.4
Cooperation and collaborative communities are visible in coordinated activities around library collections as well. It is now normal for libraries to participate in multiple communities of cooperation and collaboration as each strategy aligns with a library’s mission for various purposes or at different times. In many cases, collaboration becomes a trust-building experience, or may produce lightweight structures that later provide foundations for the deeper investments required for collaboration. In other instances, where cooperation proves insufficient to achieve desired aims, it incentivizes truly collaborative approaches. Communities of collaboration can also provide centers around which more extensive communities of cooperation are able to operate.
While the benefits of building collection management capacities out to scales beyond the institution are tantalizing, it is far from clear how to create such capacity and how to re-architect legacy collections into a new alignment with an emerging networked collection. It has only recently become possible to describe a collective collection that could be shared by libraries. Perhaps the most influential descriptive studies have come from OCLC Research, which has shared reports outlining levels of uniqueness, as well as duplication, among various aggregations of library collections. This growing body of computationally intensive analysis of the collective collection has also begun to clarify geographic distribution and other key characteristics of library collections relevant for making decisions about coordinating activities.5 There is a new understanding of collections at scale. Libraries can better assess past successes in coordination and cooperation and map new frontiers for collaborative activities as well as clarify potential efficiencies and opportunities.
FOUNDATIONS FOR A NEW ERA OF COLLABORATION
Today’s new programs and strategies for coordinating library collections leverage the capabilities of an online era, but simultaneously build directly on deep foundations of earlier collections-focused cooperation. Long-standing efforts to cooperatively build print and, more recently, digital collections offer valuable lessons. In many instances these efforts created the vibrant collaborative infrastructures that underpin the current flowering of initiatives. The cooperative efforts described in this volume owe a great deal to earlier innovations in cooperation. A handful of the most formative early experiences in library cooperation provide a flavor of the key ingredients that lead to success or hint at missing elements that might stymie visions of new efficiencies.
The Center for Research Libraries
The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is one of the longest running and most active library organizations dedicated to collaboration in collection building and management. Launched in 1949, it has focused on gathering and providing members with access to distinctive content that has not been widely collected.6 The model leverages a separately housed, centrally located collection managed by a membership organization. Members provide funds for supporting the shared collection and access to the shared collection is predicated on membership.7 The CRL organizational model and collection strategy have proven sustainable over a long period, perhaps because its collection has remained very tightly focused on distinctive, rarely duplicated materials. Even within this scope, there have been limited resources to support substantial growth of the analog collections—limited for acquisitions, and largely non-existent for space.
The Conspectus Experience
The other most influential twentieth-century experience with print coordination, the RLG Conspectus program, taught some rather different lessons. Promoted as a foundational tool for coordinating collection building, the RLG Conspectus provided a framework for collection analysis that could enable institutions to make bi- or multilateral agreements. It was expected that these collection analyses would lead to widespread coordinated, distributed collection building.8 Conspectus was widely deployed and publicly supported by a range of influential library organizations. Ultimately, its common vocabulary for collection description has proven highly valuable to the community. However, it proved difficult to catalyze coordinated collection development or management once the descriptive framework was applied, and almost no coordinated action around either collection building or management emerged from the project. The Conspectus experience demonstrated that data may seem a necessary precursor to coordination but it is not a sufficient driver by itself.9
E-Resource Licensing
Cooperative licensing of electronic resources grew rapidly late in the twentieth century. It powerfully demonstrated the substantial benefits achievable with coordinated collecting of digital resources. Licensing ejournals and databases provided a fresh raison d’être for existing consortia originally formed to advance print resource sharing and seeded a crop of new consortial entities.10 Unhindered by the need to physically house the shared collection, consortia collected content that could be owned equally by all members and delivered instantaneously to all of their users. Cooperative licensing initiated a range of new sociotechnical infrastructures to manage licensing, implement funding models, and in some cases develop shared infrastructure to store and make accessible digital content. Within the first decade of the current century, most academic and many public libraries formed and joined consortia charged with creating and managing digital collections on their behalf.11
Mass Digitization
Hard on the heels of the era of cooperative ejournal collecting, Google challenged the powerful preconception that because moving content from print to digital formats was prohibitively laborious and expensive, print and digital collections could be conceptualized and managed independently.12 With the announcement of Google’s plans to scan millions of volumes in just a few years, “mass digitization” created a new arena for digital collection building.13 Mass digitization built large digital collections that connected directly to existing print collections. By converting existing print collections, creating a publicly accessible resource, and offering partner libraries digital copies of print works in their collections, large-scale scanning opened new vistas for coordinated action. Suddenly cooperative housing and delivery of multi-million-volume digital collections became conceivable with contemporary technology. The Google scanning project rapidly led to a new kind of collaborative digital infrastructure project to build a large scale shared digital collection, HathiTrust.14 The HathiTrust was created to provide preservation and access to the large-scale scanned collections created by mass digitization programs.15
ARENAS FOR ACTION
Only a few decades into this new era of networked, hybridized library collections, a plethora of cooperative initiatives have emerged and many more are being contemplated. Any careful observer will notice the diversity of efforts and how they vary in scope, pace of progress, and degree of success. The contributions to this volume also highlight the richness of emerging cooperative ventures. As collaborative strategies have become mainstream, traction for progress is proving to be somewhat variable among different segments of library collections. Success is not guaranteed and librarians must weigh when, why, and how to engage with collaborations.
Four general arenas of opportunity for planning, assessment, and decision-making are shaping up around two primary axes of focus: prospective and retrospective collection management, and monographic and serial publications (see figure 1.1). Prospective and retrospective arenas for collaboration currently diverge by format, with retrospective collaboration engaging around print and digitized print and prospective collaboration focusing on digitally published content (although dual-format publishing is still common).
The challenges are quite different and frontiers of opportunity are opening at different times, as the collaborations discussed in this volume show. The serials arena has emerged more quickly as a source of opportunity for both prospective digital collecting and retrospective print management. The arena for monographs is developing more slowly in seeding collaborative action. Because no field of collaborative activity is yet mature, there are many opportunities to translate lessons back and forth, but it is risky to extrapolate success in one arena to another.
Figure 1.1 | Arenas for collaborative collection management
Starting with Retrospective Collections
Looking beyond the first generation of consortial success in collaborative ejournal collecting, the greatest progress and most active collaborative investment seems to be taking place in the arena of retrospective collecting, particularly in collaborative approaches to managing legacy print serial collections. Despite the twentieth-century focus on and investment in laying groundwork for collaboration around prospective print collecting, success at scale seems easier to achieve in the realm of retrospective content. Cooperative activity around lending print collections; the increasing duplication of print collections by digital; and the growth of high quality, highly concentrated, usually off-site storage of substantial print collections have lowered political barriers and risks while increasing the incentives to create programs that address legacy print content. The high levels of duplication and ease of direct-to-user, scan-on-demand delivery of serial content have made serials the obvious starting place for many cooperative projects. The number of projects aimed at building shared print collections has exploded in response.16 A 2014 survey of research libraries documented the very rapid growth occurring in the launch and development of shared print archiving programs, numbering six new program agreements in 2012 alone. The study reported an estimated five to eight million secured shared print monograph volumes and 27,180 print journal titles subject to retention commitments.17 Crist provides a window into one of the many projects addressing serials in chapter 4, “Creating a Regional Print Serial Program.” In chapter 5, Cole-Bennet, McAninch, and Martin use their experience with an ASERL program to describe some of the opportunities and complexities that arise from a coordinated approach to analog federal documents.
Monograph-oriented projects have proven more challenging to launch, likely because of lower levels of duplication within print collections and between print and digital collections, and because of greater challenges associated with providing access services from cooperative collections comparable to local collections. Nonetheless, several models are now in place and additional programs are rapidly launching within the retrospective monograph quadrant.18 In chapter 6, Revitt describes perhaps the most visible and intentionally prototypical project to date: the Maine Shared Collections Strategy. Nadal, Peterson, and Aveline delve more deeply into opportunities for coordinating preservation review with information on network-level digital and monograph archives in chapter 3.
Inroads to Prospective Collecting
Cooperative prospective print collecting remains more elusive. While there is substantial activity in the arena of collaborative collecting of digital serials, it has not translated into substantial activity in prospective collecting of print-only serials. The ongoing expectation that print serials will likely convert to digital or simply cease publication makes it hard to justify the very substantial efforts required for coordinated prospective print collecting.
Experimental activity is beginning to emerge in a small way in the arena of print and digital monograph collecting. Carreño and Maltarich’s chapter 7 describes an unusual experiment in collaborative print monograph collecting coordinated with shared purchasing of corresponding digital monographs in their chapter describing an initiative of the Manhattan Research Library Initiative. A different strategy for coordinated ebook collecting has emerged in the form of consortial demand-driven approval plans. In chapter 8, Levine-Clark, Level, Lamborn, and Machovec provide an overview of several innovative consortial Demand-Driven Acquisitions (DDA) programs including the Orbis Cascade Alliance and the Ontario Council of University Libraries, among others, before providing an up-close look at the work of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries. Berger and Mitchell push the boundaries on prospective consortial collecting into the frontier of consortial publishing in their chapter on a California program to promote the creation of open access digital collections in chapter 9.
ARCHITECTING COLLABORATION
In considering a range of collaborative projects addressing different segments of the collections landscape, common concerns also recur regularly. Effective governance structures are increasingly understood as essential to successful collaborative strategies for collection management. Governance structures both drive and reflect mission; they enable coordination, decision-making, planning, and resource management. At the same time they also conform to community culture, politics, resources, needs, and constraints. The emergence of both new strategies for developing governance to support the creation of collective collections and innovation in the application of existing governance structures has been striking. Payne explores this issue directly in chapter 2, but details about governance structures are discussed at length in most of this volume’s chapters. A careful reader will note instances where collaborations leverage and build out existing governance and organization, and instances where new organizations or modifications to existing governance have been implemented.
Rather than constructing archipelagoes of isolated collections, increasingly libraries are seeking to create ecosystems of shared collections. This goal requires not simply governance structures, but new kinds of architectures of commitment that can span organizational boundaries and network levels. Architectures of commitment increasingly include memos of understanding among communities’ members that articulate mutual expectations but also include resource sharing agreements that can extend the value of the community’s collective collection to libraries beyond that community. Public statements of policy, scoping, etc., enable communities of collaboration to communicate their intentions and commitments to broader communities of coordination. Chapters 2 and 6 particularly highlight some emerging architectures for print archiving.19
WHY COLLABORATE?
Cooperative initiatives around collection management seek to enhance libraries’ collective ability to secure the products of scholarship and cultural heritage while provide ongoing access to those works for current and future users. Efficiency in managing library collections is not a goal for its own sake, but a necessary strategy to ensure that finite resources can be leveraged to achieve broad collecting, ongoing curation, and continuous access. In the twentieth-century world of print-based publishing, uncoordinated action by individual libraries leveraging their local resources independently to build and house the largest collections they could afford and make available to their affiliated users, built necessary coverage and redundancy for the collective collection. In the twenty-first century, use of print collections is gradually decreasing, but still valuable, while digital collections become increasingly resource-intensive to maintain. Balancing current and ongoing access to the fullest possible collection is not merely a local concern but a community-wide concern. Even where a library wishes to reduce the redundancy of its analog collections relative to the collective holdings of the library community, it wants to be assured that its users will continue to have access to the full range of print scholarship available currently. Meanwhile, limited resources also pressure libraries to coordinate prospective collection building so that the fullest scope of publishing can be brought into active management.
Increasing coordination somehow has to take place in a manner that not only pushes to scale but also attracts the resources needed to do the work of shifting from managing isolated local collections to managing at different network levels. To carry out this transformation, libraries must individually and collectively recapture resources through new efficiencies and attract resources to build a range of social and technical infrastructures that release the potential of collection management at the network level. The cases in this volume provide a window into both kinds of investments, and the returns on those investments that are accelerating the present shift to networked, collective collections. The vibrancy of the activity that is shaping a new ecosystem of collections and collection management infrastructures is on display in the following pages.
Notes
1. Lorcan Dempsey, Constance Malpas, and Brian Lavoie, “Collection Directions: The Evolution of Library Collections and Collecting,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 14, no. 3 (2014): 393–423.
2. Ibid.
3. See Brad Wheeler and James L. Hilton, “The Marketecture of Community,” EDUCAUSE Review, December 2012. Many of their arguments about overlapping architectures of coordination are similar to the observations offered by Dempsey, Malpas, and Lavoie.
4. Ibid.
5. Lorcan Dempsey, Brian Lavoie, Constance Malpas, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Roger C. Schonfeld, J. D. Shipengrover, and Günter Waibel, Understanding the Collective Collection: Towards a System-Wide Perspective on Library Print Collections, December 2013, http://oclc.org/research/publications/library/2013/2013-09r.html, offers a helpful compilation of this body of research. The most recent addition is Constance Malpas and Brian Lavoie, Right-Scaling Stewardship: A Multi-Scale Perspective on Cooperative Print Management (Dublin, OH: OCLC Research, 2014), www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/publications/library/2014/oclcresearch-cooperative-print-management-2014.pdf.
6. For a brief history of CRL and its mission around cooperative collection building, see Bernard F. Reilly Jr., “The Future of Cooperative Collections and Repositories: A Case Study of the Center for Research Libraries,” Library Management 34, no. 4 (2013): 342–51, doi:10.1108/01435121311328681.
7. Linda A. Naru, “The Role of the Center for Research Libraries in the History and Future of Cooperative Collection Development,” Collection Management 23, no. 4 (December 1, 1998): 47–58, doi:10.1300/J105v23n04_04.
8. Nancy E. Gwinn and Paul H. Mosher, “Coordinating Collection Development: The RLG Conspectus,” College and Research Libraries 44, no. 2 (March 1, 1983): 128–40, doi:10.5860/crl_44_02_128.
9. Ross Atkinson offers lessons learned from the Conspectus effort, addressing positive outcomes as well as factors behind its failure to achieve its initial aims, in “In Defense of Relativism,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 17 (January 1992): 353–54.
10. Norman Oder, “Consortia Hit Critical Mass,” Library Journal 125, no. 2 (2000): 48 provides a helpful snapshot of consortial evolution. Adrian W. Alexander, “Toward ‘the Perfection of Work’: Library Consortia in the Digital Age,” Journal of Library Administration 28, no. 2 (1999), places the blossoming of consortia in the 1990s in a broader historical perspective of evolving library collaboration.
11. Katherine Perry considers the evolution of consortia and the ongoing shifts in emphasis for collaborative activities in “Where Are Library Consortia Going? Results of a 2009 Survey,” Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community 22, no. 2 (January 1, 2009): 122–30, doi:10.1629/22122. Rick Burke reviews the leading cooperative functions dominating the work of consortia in “Library Consortia and the Future of Academic Libraries,” in Leaders Look Toward the Future: A Companion Website to Academic Librarianship, ed. Camila A. Alire and G. Edward Evans (New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2010). Licensing-oriented consortia have proved mature enough to support their own international association (The International Coalition of Library Consortia) and to attract discussions of appropriate assessment and return on investment; see Stephen Bosch, Lucy Lyons, Mary H. Munroe, Anna H. Perrault, and Chris Sugnet, “Measuring Success of Cooperative Collection Development,” Collection Management 28, no. 3 (March 29, 2004): 223–39, doi:10.1300/J105v28n03_03; Faye A. Chadwell, “Assessing the Value of Academic Library Consortia,” Journal of Library Administration 51, no. 7-8 (October 2011): 645–61, doi:10.1080/01930826.2011.601268; and David F. Kohl and Tom Sanville, “More Bang for the Buck: Increasing the Effectiveness of Library Expenditures Through Cooperation,” Library Trends 54, no. 3 (Winter 2006): 394–410.
12. Kevin Kelly, “Scan This Book!,” The New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2006.
13. Karen Coyle, “Mass Digitization of Books,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 32, no. 6 (November 2006): 641–45, doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2006.08.002.
14. Terence K. Huwe, “Building Digital Libraries. HathiTrust’s Ascendance as a Web-Level Digital Library,” Computers in Libraries 31, no. 8 (October 2011): 32–34.
15. HathiTrust reported more than one hundred partners providing over thirteen million digitized volumes in January 2015 (www.hathitrust.org/about).
16. Robert H. Kieft and Lizanne Payne, “Collective Collection, Collective Action,” Collection Management 37, no. 3-4 (July 1, 2012): 137–52, doi:10.1080/01462679.2012.685411.
17. Rebecca Crist and Emily Stambaugh, Shared Print Programs, SPEC Kit 345 (December 2014), http://publications.arl.org/Shared-Print-Programs-SPEC-Kit-345.
18. For instance, HathiTrust members have approved via ballot the launch of a print monograph archive program corresponding to its digital corpus (www.hathitrust.org/constitutional_convention2011_ballot_proposals#proposa11). The HathiTrust Print Monographs Archive Planning Task Force was charged in April 2014 (www.hathitrust.org/print_monographs_archive_charge).
19. Crist and Stambaugh, Shared Print Programs, and Kieft and Payne, “Collective Collection, Collective Action,” also offer detailed examples of documents. The Maine Shared Collections Project described by Revitt in chapter 6 of this volume also offers a wealth of documents at www.maineinfonet.org/mscs/progress.