John McDonald and Robert H. Kieft
Readers in the Christian tradition will recall, and others may know, the New Testament story commonly referred to as the “parable of the talents” (Matthew 25:14–30). It is preceded by the equally well-known story of the wise and foolish virgins and is followed by another well-known story about the separation of sheep and goats. All three in the series are tales that Jesus uses with his disciples to elucidate God’s values and the grounds on which God judges human beings. These stories might make many readers uneasy because of their all-or-nothing outcomes, and reference to them may seem out of place in a book about library collections. All three, however, take up themes of preparation for an unknown future and doing the right thing based on a productive notion of service in the face of the unknown. As a tale of agency, risk, capital, and the roles of those who manage assets, the parable of the talents in particular frames the current situation of libraries’ roles with respect especially to print collections. It raises questions about the value of collections that librarians would do well to heed.
The story is a simple one. A master leaves home to travel and entrusts his servants with quantities of money: five talents to one, two talents to another, and one talent to a third. Upon his return, he finds that the first two servants invested the money and improved its value, while the third buried his one talent in the ground to safeguard it for the master’s return. The story concludes as he rewards the first two and punishes the third.
A reader might derive several morals from this tale, but for anyone who has ever put a book on the shelf or into a storage tray, at least one moral is as clear as Ranganathan’s law that “books are for use”: one doesn’t bury assets with the hope of (merely) preserving them, but rather seeks to increase their value, their utility. To some extent, the library preserves assets against unknown future utility; it buries them in the stacks like time capsules in the hope that future generations will find them interesting enough to open and profit from. As stewards of the record of culture, as managers of assets, libraries also confront questions of demand and allocating resources in the more immediate term and have to ask whether the best approach to collections is avoiding risk, as the servant with the one talent chose to do, or embracing it in order to reap a reward. Moreover, libraries’ role as agent for the affairs of the cultural record, however actively they play that role, is complicated by their serving a number of masters who have several and different goals and will reward asset stewardship accordingly.
Implicit in the several chapters of this collection are issues of management for protection against loss; for benefit and growth; for efficient operation; and for possible gain in the present, through avoiding costs or reallocating resources or, in the future, through new work that scholars will produce. In her introduction (chapter 1), Karla Strieb highlights important historical moments for collections collaboration, together with its twin, resource sharing, beginning in the mid-twentieth century. This concluding chapter highlights and contextualizes the achievements of the projects described in this volume as moments in the ongoing history Strieb describes. It focuses on the challenges and opportunities that exist as well as those that should be created in order to accomplish the transformation in library collection management, or stewardship, that shared collections envision and require. The questions these projects are trying to answer, the bases for future action they suggest, and the actions or structures (in Strieb’s formulation, the architectures) they sketch will enable the library community to build toward a future in which risks are collectively considered, and taken, and value is created by libraries as effective agents of their many masters.
Strieb’s introductory chapter reminds readers that the Internet changed everything with respect to library materials and services—everything from materials formats to the creation, publication, distribution, and preservation of knowledge; everything from the conduct of reference service to readers’ expectations of access times and mechanisms, from what libraries “collect” to how they budget, serve users, think about technology, allocate space, describe jobs, chart organizational structures, and, not least for the purposes of the present volume, relate to other libraries and such other organizations as publishers, jobbers, and commercial service providers. These relationships in turn affect local infrastructure and culture and, most importantly, assumptions about the meaning or boundaries of the “local.”
In this context and as Strieb suggests, the chapters in this volume circle around a number of issues that arise for library groups in a digitally dominated, networked new world as they build on and move beyond the largely trust-based or loosely regulated arrangements informing traditional programs for (print) cooperative collection development and resource sharing. Libraries involved in the current generation of collaborative collections projects are establishing tightly structured dependencies that at once rely on and transform the heretofore friendly reciprocity of cooperation into a more radical unification of collecting interests—interests that present themselves along a continuum of activities that challenge libraries to think less in terms of “collections,” understood as groups of objects, than of “materials access provision,” understood as the many channels or formats through or in which something can be accessed or delivered.
The projects reported in these pages are answering, at least provisionally, questions about how best to respond to the challenges and opportunities available in the networked world of information resources. They are thinking about avoiding costs; preserving and making materials accessible; and deciding such matters as which materials to depend on each other for, the scope of their partnership and the terms for governing it, financial and operating conditions of their partnership, staffing patterns, technology requirements, and the relationships of a given partnership to others and to the national library community. They also remind everyone that the print book remains important to students and faculty; that libraries which share systems enjoy advantages; that libraries in a given group have different resource bases, goals, and traditions with respect to collections; and that inconsistencies and incompleteness of print holdings data are primary inhibitors to making confident arrangements for collective stewardship.
The digital repository experience of the University of California (UC) System through its California Digital Library (CDL) reminds librarians particularly that shared print is conceptually and practically easier in many ways and can scale more easily because of the well-understood issues around sharing books and journals, including the familiarity of the format and its conservation and housing requirements. The impediments to shared print are less technical than they are cultural—acceptance of a delivery as opposed to an on-the-shelf model and the culture of localization and property rights that the physicality of print has encouraged. As demonstrated by the formation of the HathiTrust or CLOCKSS, however, and as evidenced by the UC case study, libraries may well be more aware of the importance of collectively, rather than individually, building access and preservation environments for digitized resources because of libraries’ unequal capacities for creating them and the complexity and demands of maintaining them and the files in them.
Projects for sharing both print and electronic collections deal with the complexities of multiple institutional affiliations; acknowledge the risks involved in accommodating the different or changing abilities of group members to participate in programs; and the difficulties, especially for shared monograph programs, of defining the “sameness” of copies and of being unable to predict the behaviors of libraries outside their group with respect to drawing down their collections. First and foremost, as Crist makes clear in chapter 4, shared print projects are risking decisions today about resource provision and preservation without knowing which materials future readers and scholars will want or how they will want to use library resources.
Questions of comprehensiveness and completeness of the shared resource base arise for both print and electronic collections when managed collaboratively. In the case of retrospectively oriented shared print programs, participants must secure content in circumstances where the holdings data on which they depend are dubiously reliable and some libraries withdraw large numbers of books without consideration of holdings elsewhere. In the case of collaborative prospective ebook collections, libraries are buying fewer new books or using DDA programs such as those in the Orbis Cascade Alliance,1 ConnectNY,2 or the Colorado Alliance3 that rely on reader behavior to create the common collection. Concerns about variety and comprehensiveness inevitably arise, therefore, alongside the knowledge that any given library in such partnerships surrenders the power of selection for its “collection” to readers of partner libraries, which may be buying titles it never would. These concerns among academic libraries about the coherence of the shared resource base managed at scale take on a more vexed character than do the arrangements that characterized previous cooperative collection development programs of sharing acquisition and custodial responsibility for bodies of printed material or microform sets, arrangements that typically included two or an otherwise small number of partners focusing on a few resources.4 Ebook projects certainly have the advantages that suites of system- or state-supported electronic databases enjoy in allowing all member libraries of a consortium to draw on a common body of material. Focusing as they do, however, on general collection rather than specialized bodies of material, they challenge assumptions about local core collections and, thereby, core assumptions about mission, independence, and control, all of which are profoundly implicated in readers’ and librarians’ sense of institutional pride and local effectiveness.
Among shared monograph projects, that of MaRLI in Manhattan (Carreño and Maltarich, chapter 7) takes a multidimensional approach with a program that recognizes different use cases for ebooks and print books and does not rely on user selection but rather the comprehensive collecting mission of a research library. The MaRLI libraries purchase a common copy of a print monograph as part of an acquisition program for ebooks with Oxford’s University Press Scholarship Online and with other vendors for both formats in Spain, Italy, and Argentina. The MaRLI project also takes the difficult step of identifying and “collecting” open access monographs, all presumably discoverable on the web but for which the customary infrastructure channels of identification, ingest, cataloging, and preservation do not exist. Using practices from both print and electronic acquisitions, bibliographic control, and archiving, MaRLI models for libraries a future that anticipates the growth of open access publishing and the collective enterprise that will be needed to steward such publications.
Consortia that collect current ebooks are working with a variety of challenges in terms of licensing, pricing, and collecting scope. Many consortia like these have a record of attempts at, and in some cases success in, collecting new general collection print monographs, something that the RLG Conspectus had imagined for large groups of libraries but which only geographically proximate small groups of usually smaller academic libraries have managed to accomplish. Local histories of collaboration and proximity have led to shared print monograph collections among such groups as the TriCollege Consortium of Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges; Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin Colleges; Connecticut and Trinity Colleges and Wesleyan University; and, among universities, the Triangle Research Library Network (TRLN) group. The Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) group is unique thus far in using Sustainable Collections Services’ (SCS) collection analysis protocols to prepare for future joint collecting of print and thus harkens back to the Conspectus.5 The Orbis Cascade Alliance’s guideline about the number of print copies desirable in the consortium6 and OhioLink’s experience that shared knowledge of holdings or orders at partner libraries tends to reduce the number of copies purchased7 are also steps in the Conspectus direction. The extent to which proactive collection development—whether for space or budgetary reasons or for reasons of greater inclusivity through deduplication—will occur in the many groups working on shared retrospective print collection management or shared ebook collection building remains very much to be seen.
These several approaches to sharing monographs in multiple formats suggest a complex future that merges programs for demand-driven acquisition and comprehensive collecting at the group level for ebooks, with provision of print copies disbursed among the participants. This scenario essentially combines many of the elements of collaborative shared collections, even as it moves libraries and readers toward a future in which most uses of monographs will be electronic. In this scenario, libraries work collectively, rather than individually, to profile the potential collection, recognizing that they need parallel collective structures to preserve both purchased and open access electronic publications, and that housing the print archival “backup” copy in one of their local collections is important for current and future use cases in which readers prefer print.
Shared print collections for any type of publication necessarily engage discussion of the merits of centralization or distribution of the shared volumes. In the case of journals, for example, Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST) and Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) use a distributed model of collection retention, whereas the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), like the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and partner Linda Hall Library of Science and Technology, take a centralized approach. Journal archiving projects also differ in that ASERL builds its collection through title nomination, WEST through risk analysis, and CIC through publisher-based groups of titles.8 In ASERL’s case, the government documents program is decentralized, and no currently active program for shared monographs is centralized except to the extent that some large bodies of monographs may already be in storage facilities, as in the cases of the University of California Regional Library Facilities, Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC), ReCAP, or Five Colleges, Inc.
These projects also illuminate the arguments about the costs, desirability of, and methods for verification of the existence, condition, and completeness of volumes retained. In journal projects, several models present themselves to handle the risks of verification and condition. CIC and ASERL accept a level of risk based on volume-level validation, and WEST asks for various levels of validation; all three stop short of the page-level validation that the UC system performed for its JSTOR archive.
In the case of monographic shared print programs, most participants will say that a systematic verification for existence and condition is too costly to perform at the time of making retention commitments, which can run into the hundreds of thousands of volumes. They go on to say they will accept the risk that a percentage of the retained collection does not exist or is in poor condition, and may further say, as ReCAP has, that they will handle verification as books are encountered or found missing. Recent studies of collections in Iowa9 and California,10 the former using a complete survey and the latter a sampling method, suggest however that in college libraries only a very small percentage of books cannot be accounted for or are in poor enough condition that they cannot well serve readers. Nadal, Peterson, and Aveline’s study in this volume (chapter 3) also shows that volumes in storage facilities, like books that have been digitized in the last ten years by Google and others, enjoy a substantially greater chance of being available because they have been handled recently enough that they are known to exist or are no longer subject to the rough-and-tumble of life on the open shelf. Such studies encourage the shared print community to consider the level of risk taken when discussing sharing programs with constituents.
For print materials, especially books, issues of risk are also being handled for low-use volumes by adopting a safety net of multiple copies as the Maine case (chapter 6) and counterpart shared monograph projects in New York (ConnectNY),11 Michigan (MI-SPI),12 Indiana (ALI-PALNI),13 and Iowa (CI-CCI)14 show. Such multiple commitments, whether made based only on group holdings or with an understanding of the existence of copies outside the group, may well result at the network level in too many copies being saved for the likely demand, whether regional or national. These multiple commitments, however, offer a secure and acceptable transition for smaller and medium-sized regional groups as they seek to enusre their constituents they are keeping titles available in familiar state and regional resource sharing networks.
ASERL’s government documents project exemplifies a less common but important aspect of the shared collections picture, domain-based sharing. In the case of federal documents, circulation cannot matter as a criterion for deduplicating low-use materials in favor of partnered access until libraries and the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) can agree on different standards for collection retention, which means that ASERL’s concentrating agency-based collections among partner libraries is a good idea. The ASERL project (Cole-Bennett, McAninch, and Martin, chapter 5) gains value in two ways, first through aggregation into a comprehensive collection and second through the prospect of digitizing the materials archived for public access. The latter is an idea that circulates through many shared print programs as a goal for identifying titles not yet served by a digital copy, but ASERL’s and projects like it are at the forefront of the movement. On the familiar needs-and-offers model of the federal documents community, the ASERL documents project uses tools developed by the University of Florida that have now been made available as JRNL to journal archiving groups so that their members can offer journals to libraries that want them to fill gaps in archived backfiles.15 Because of its concentration on a specific body of material and on digitization as a means both for preservation and increased access, the ASERL documents project resembles Ceres,16 CRL and partners’ program for agricultural materials, and CRL and Law Library Microform Consortium’s initiative17 and NELLCO’s PALMPrint18 for aggregating and/or digitizing legal materials. These archiving and digitization efforts imitate older forms of cooperative collection development for disciplinary materials and, perhaps less directly, the efforts of publishers like Adam Matthew and Chadwyck Healey to create greater access to materials on a particular topic through reformatting. They are more like JSTOR, however, in that they gather garden-variety materials, digitize them for greater access, and pave the way for individual libraries both to contribute to a central paper archive and divest their own copies.
The case studies in this volume surface but do not dwell on the importance of several infrastructure elements that have emerged in the last five to ten years to lend coherence to shared collections work. Beyond such long-standing regional shared housing cooperatives as the University of California’s Regional Library Facilities, Minnesota Library Access Center (MLAC), WRLC, Five Colleges, Inc., and OhioLink are the organizational structures that regional networks, many of them former OCLC partners, have provided for shared collections projects. During the last few years, the development of SCS (an OCLC product as of 2015) and its collection analysis tools and shared print consultancy, together with Rick Lugg’s presentation and blogging history and the geographic range of SCS’s customer base, has played an essential role in defining shared approaches to monographs.
Another important part of this infrastructure is the influence of Lizanne Payne’s consulting practice, not only with such entities as OCLC and CRL but with shared journal and monograph projects in Maine, New England (EAST), the western half of the United States (WEST), and California (SCELC). Her work in these projects with policy and governance development and MOU frameworks, as outlined in this volume (chapter 2), have exercised influence well beyond her immediate clients. Together with OCLC Research’s groundbreaking studies of the collective print monograph collection and the public events where they are discussed, CRL’s Print Archive Network (PAN) Forum has played a role in building the shared print community since the summer of 2009.19 PAN extends CRL’s long commitment to shared collections by sponsoring semi-annual meetings at ALA attended by consortial executives, librarians, and vendors and then archiving the presentations and reports at the CRL website. CRL has also developed the searchable PAPR database to register archiving commitments and offer summaries of shared print partnerships’ archiving agreements and policies.20
As the foregoing review suggests, many examples are available to library groups for modeling shared collections of print and electronic publications with varying kinds or levels of commitment, and with varying approaches to services, costs, governance, and risk. These models are evolving an infrastructure of data, information systems, organizations, foundation-funded experiments, and advice that has experienced rapid development in the last ten years. At the same time numerous articles, reports, position papers, and conference presentations have solidified a body of documentation that, like the Maine Shared Collection Consortium’s (MSCC) “Shared Print Agreements for Monographs: A User’s Manual,” propels and enables effective, informed collections collaboration.
Even as they address immediate or practical issues of resource allocation for their members, these many collaborative projects also conduce to a collective new strategic direction for libraries. Strieb’s vivid distinction between archipelagos and ecosystems—between, on the one hand, library islands connected in a linear relationship or by proximity of goals and, on the other hand, a complex system of interactions, dependencies, and balances—illuminates the many aspects of collaboration that need architectures of holdings and use data, information systems, policy and governance agreements, funding streams, delivery and service enhancements, preservation strategies, and, above all, a redefined network model for institutional, commercial, and organizational relationships.
Large-scale collaborative collection management for many classes of materials is becoming a strategic and operational goal for libraries despite issues with holdings data; a preference for local copies over widely distributed, partnered access; and the incomplete acceptance and availability of digitized text. The big question among shared collections groups is how, or whether, the many individual projects now underway can or should add up to a national or even international structure. Granting the variety of local and consortial circumstances, affiliations, and priorities, and the several ways of going about shared collecting, librarians in the shared print community are asking what could a network-level collection really look like? Does it emerge or is it designed? Where is the locus or what is the organizational structure for the transition from regional arrangements to comprehensiveness?
Many of the working parts of a comprehensive system are now in place or taking shape, and essential elements of that system will coordinate or depend on the affordances of print and digitized text. To achieve the goal of a fully and robustly networked collection, libraries and their home institutions and consortia should:
1. Move toward supporting universal access to published material, including means for shared acquisition and preservation. They should overcome the biases toward independence and competition fostered by different missions, resources, and the physicality of materials, and think of themselves as participants in a network whose many nodes collectively meet local needs. Getting beyond the resource sharing model of ownership and local privilege to true sharing will mean, at a very practical level and especially in the case of print collections, that all readers, no matter their affiliation, enjoy the same privileges with respect to any given library’s materials. Current models distinguish among readers, giving primary allegiance to readers at the home library and treating those from outside the home library as beneficiaries of a temporary favor. To have a truly collaborative collection and robust shared model, all readers need the same loan, renewal, and other use privileges because their library may be making a decision to forgo a local copy in favor of a copy in the network.
2. Begin expediently by archiving print materials in place, that is, on open shelves or already secured in high-density storage. Over time, the latter will probably become anchor collections for the shared print network. While it is unlikely that mass movement of print to centralized locations will occur soon, a regular drawdown of holdings by smaller and medium-sized libraries that have not historically adopted a preservation mission will probably result in collections of significance being centralized at a smaller number of locations. Centralization in high-density storage facilities may also occur for preservation purposes because a volume’s chances of long-term survival increase in such locations. Moreover, last and scarce copies are likely to migrate into such facilities, which have the capacity to provide additional services for retained volumes.
3. Develop a business model for the eventual centralization of print collections in “repositories of record,” even though for some time to come shared print repositories, especially for monographs and government publications, will be distributed collections. Based on analytics, create channels from libraries that no longer wish to hold unique or scarce copies to those willing to archive them as repositories of record. Such channels could be mediated by OCLC or by regional consortia in a needs/offers market and would facilitate changes to holdings symbols as well as funding of the collective enterprise. The repositories-of-record approach would therefore be at once an assertion of the preservation mission of research libraries and an acknowledgment that they are engaging in a service business which other libraries will want to help them afford to maintain.
4. Leverage the capacity of OCLC’s WorldCat and other library industry frameworks to register and share print retention commitments easily in large numbers with local and regional catalogs. Libraries should build tools for a variety of group analytics that allow partnerships to make print retention and withdrawal decisions based on these commitments and on the number, distribution, and use of copies retained; they should expand these systems to record condition and other relevant artifactual metadata about print books as encountered in circulation and digitization.
5. Create a well-informed, orderly drawdown of print books, journals, reference serials, and government documents against print archiving commitments and knowledge of the number of copies needed to serve demand according to the several purposes that readers have. This more structured approach will prevent possible irreversible loss due to a “chaotic drawdown” in which individual libraries reduce print collection footprints without knowledge of or concern for the effect their deaccessioning decision may have on the network of collections.
6. Accept the risks of an initially decentralized, low-validation print storage and retention approach by adopting the analysis of Nadal et al. in chapter 3 of this volume and of other work by Nadal advocating models from forest or endangered species management.21 Following the MSCC and HathiTrust examples, consortia should develop protocols for declaring retention commitments for masses of print materials, especially those already housed in storage facilities and then refine future retention commitments through iterative group analysis of unique, scarce, and undigitized volumes or those not retained in sufficient numbers among all groups. The continued development of collaborative print collections depends on shifting the concept of risk management from local preserve/replace/withdraw protocols to the network level of regional or domain-driven consortia, mega-regions, or national systems. The library community should continue the work Nadal and colleagues have done and replicate such verification studies as those referred to above in Iowa and California in order to arrive at a more complete understanding of the risks involved in retention commitments, to determine the appropriate parameters for the number of copies needed at various participation levels or for various purposes, and to ensure that enough copies are retained to circulate throughout the network as some deteriorate and as demand for print drops over the decades. In this regard, the large-scale verification study Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust (EAST) will do under its 2015 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will be of great importance.
7. Address the needs of specialized reader communities for access to print for its historical value in as many copies as they deem necessary and develop metadata, archiving, and access structures to meet such needs. As Professor Andrew Stauffer has argued, pre-twentieth-century books may have artifactual as well as informational or content value, and the work of historians of publishing, reading cultures, and institutions benefits from the existence or knowledge of many individual copies.22 As libraries share collections and collectively draw down copies to meet foreseeable demand, they will want to take into account features that make copies unique, that is, features of a given volume that cannot be represented by any other copies retained or digitized. No shared print agreements currently consider artifactual value except to the extent they exclude special collections from their programs. The grant that Stauffer was awarded in December 2014 under CLIR’s Hidden Collections program will model how libraries might efficiently identify and retain such volumes.23
8. Fully engage libraries of different types, and break down the barrier between public and academic library collections. Collaboration at large scale or the network level may be a reality for some like-minded academic libraries, but differences in mission, constituencies, or values make it challenging to collaborate on shared collections across libraries of all types. OCLC’s research indicates that large regional public libraries have a role to play in forming the collective collection, and they certainly do for retrospective shared print projects.24 In addition, the authors’ own experience with the multi-type regional resource sharing network Link+, which includes large academic research libraries, small college libraries, and public library systems, has shown that patrons of each type of library benefit from access to the others.25 At this point only MSCC includes public libraries in its shared collection, although MLAC houses materials from both public and academic libraries. Resource sharing networks throughout the country, like Link+ and its cousin, San Diego Circuit, include public and academic libraries. Such networks could readily serve as the conduit for public library collections into print retention programs sponsored by academic library groups.
9. Create an alliance, set of agreements, or organization that incorporates the interests and accomplishments of local and regional consortia and creates the policy and relationships which will transform current shared print agreements into a national structure. One possibility is a combination of OCLC, CRL, HathiTrust, and a few other major shared collections groups such as CDL, EAST, CIC, and ASERL/WRLC, convened by CLIR under its Committee on Coherence and Scale.
10. Find their way to a collective business model based on experience in current consortia and new research. Even though the informed rightsizing of historical print collections done at network scale will most likely result in more copies being retained in the short and intermediate terms than will eventually be needed, the reduction by many libraries of their commitments to print will concentrate demand on the remaining print copies and thereby potentially place a service and cost burden on their holders. At the same time, reading practices will probably evolve away from print as more texts become available digitally and scholarly publishing and communication find new forms. Determining the business model for support of the collective collection, therefore, will require modeling the effects of drawdown on the demand for remaining print copies in the presence of this evolution. The business model should account for load balancing, address the “you’re going to keep it anyway, so why should I pay you to do it?” argument, and consider the cost-benefit analysis of centralization and distribution and the formula by which libraries of various sizes and capacities contribute to support the collective collection or pay for services from it. The results of such work can then be correlated with the results of the CLIR-commissioned study on the costs of a national repository system26 and OCLC Research’s several studies of the composition and distribution of the collective collection.
Although grant funding has figured prominently in the development of such shared print agreements as WEST, EAST, and MSCC, business models tend to rely initially on a sense of common purpose, in-kind contribution from members, existing services and materials housing venues, and membership fees in order to enable a faster start-up. They tend to be careful to maintain a distinction between enterprise support and service transactions, and they look forward to offering enhanced services and dealing with cost increases as shared endeavors mature based on member-driven evolution of the business model—a strategy that allows libraries to transition from supporting local collecting and retention to supporting shared collections.
1. Experiment with and develop consortial prospective collecting programs for print and ebooks on the basis of MaRLI’s assumption that university press and non-English-language scholarly monographs will be low use on the whole. Build on traditions of cooperative collection development in the ways that MaRLI is doing, particularly with non-English materials among research library collections. MaRLI’s collecting vision in conjunction with two of its three members’ participation in ReCAP points the US library community toward the unified vision of shared monographic preservation, acquisition, and publishing articulated by JISC and partners in “A National Monograph Strategy” for the United Kingdom.27
2. Push the boundaries of digitization and digital publishing of academic research materials by addressing issues relating to in-copyright work and future scholarship that can benefit from alternative publishing models. These issues include solving the “snippet” problem for in-copyright digitized books and stepping up programs for daylighting orphan works. Solving the full-text access problem for in-copyright works is fraught with all manner of legal impediments, as Google and HathiTrust well know, but one of the major impediments to sharing print collections is the lack of a parallel digital library. Continued future support for open access (OA) publishing must be paired with parallel archiving efforts through CLOCKSS, Portico, and HathiTrust, and accomplished by shifting increasing percentages of the acquisitions budget to these efforts over several years. Whether through Knowledge Unlatched, Open Humanities Library, OAPEN, or Open Access Network, increasing OA (re)publishing will render many aspects of sharing collections moot and will shift libraries’ roles to creating better discovery and use tools, preserving digital objects, and publishing enterprises as opposed to paying publishers for specific items.
3. Expand the number of participants and types of organizations engaging in collaborative acquisition of ebooks and ejournals and improve support for building common repositories and access platforms for all or a large subset of their members.
The essays in this volume have considered a variety of responses to the question of “why, when, for whom, and how do local aggregations of things become a collective, shared collection?” A number of other projects cited in the present chapter offer additional responses to such questions, and in their number and variety help to raise the larger question of whether all these projects can or should come together as a de facto or designed national system for shared collections. Kieft and Payne noted in 2012 that the next few years would witness shared print projects “transformed by increased scale, scope, connectivity, and cost-sharing.”28 Their prediction has proved true, even as, Strieb notes in this volume, the major challenge confronting a program of collective stewardship is that “increasing coordination somehow has to happen in a manner that not only pushes to scale but attracts the resources needed to do the work of shifting from managing isolated local collections to managing at different network levels” (p. 11–12).
As shared collections projects coalesce around shared values and practices, technical infrastructure, and policy into larger structures, readers of this essay should watch in 2016 for the publication of CLIR’s study on the costs of building and maintaining a network of print repositories and the implementation of the HathiTrust shared monographs archive.29 Both will be singularly important to future discussion of shared collections, especially print, in that they complement and build on the network analyses of OCLC Research and model cost, policy, and governance considerations for nationwide programs.
The case of California, where the UC System,30 the California State University System,31 and independent colleges and universities in SCELC32 are all working on aspects of shared print for monographs in overlapping but independent ways, will be instructive in terms of the extent to which groups with different loyalties and governance structures might work together. The same is true of EAST33 as it tries to bring together various collections, many of them large and powerful, into a regional collaboration. The consequences of OCLC’s purchase of SCS and the enhanced services OCLC is developing to support shared print partnerships will also become clear in 2016 and beyond. Across the Atlantic, JISC’s “National Monograph Strategy”34 bears watching as a barometer of how the many dimensions of monograph publishing, distribution, and preservation might come together. As CRL and regional consortia continue to refine, expand, and even join their programs, meetings with multi-institutional sponsorship to develop a shared print structure for North America are in prospect.
The logics that propel collections collaboration, whether based in “simple” programs of saving things for the future or more complex, even contentious, proposals for (re)making that future by creating new relationships, institutions, or collecting practices, invite libraries as creators and managers of the record of culture to accept the risks of ongoing investment in it. The future of shared collections, whatever the format or medium, will center on strategies for value creation—after all, if a local library cannot afford to retain or buy everything, the argument has to be made that the material is worth saving or purchasing collectively. For scholars, value will be gained by preserving low-use material as well as increasing its readiness for use through domain-based or otherwise structured digitization programs, enhanced description, and new access models so that they can follow the long tail to its end. Programs that create value from resources held collectively will also result from partners’ ability to shift resources to higher demand or local mission-driven collections or to greater support of open access publishing of general collections materials, as so many libraries now do for their special collections.
As libraries build shared collections and services around them, they continue simultaneously to serve their preservation and access missions and to invest the capital in their charge by creating more coherent approaches to meeting changing user needs. Through enhancing discovery and accessibility, pooling resources, building information and delivery infrastructures, digitizing more materials, and undertaking research, libraries will network into sharing responsibility for all kinds of materials in ways that prepare them at once to meet the unknown future and to shape that future, as they do their assets, in service to their many masters.
Notes
1. Orbis Cascade Alliance E-book Program, www.orbiscascade.org/ebooks.
2. ConnectNY Ebook Project Updates, http://connectny.org/about/projects/e-book-project/updates/0/.
3. Michael Levine-Clark, “Demand-Driven Acquisition in the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries,” paper presented at the ALA Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, June 30, 2013, www.slideshare.net/MichaelLevineClark/alliance-dda-alcts-ala-annual-2013.
4. James Burgett, John Haar, and Linda Phillips, Collaborative Collection Development: A Practical Guide for Your Library (Chicago: American Library Association, 2004).
5. Genya O’Gara, “VIVA—Collaborating to Build: Using Collection Analysis to Inform Consortial Collection Development,” paper presented at the Print Archive Network Meeting at the ALA Midwinter Meeting, Chicago, IL, January 30, 2015, www.crl.edu/sites/default/files/event_materials/8_OGara_2015-ALA-MidWinter-PAN.pptx.
6. Orbis Cascade Alliance, “Threshold: Voluntary Limitations on the Duplication of Books within the Alliance,” www.orbiscascade.org/threshold.
7. Julia Gammon and Edward T. O’Neill, “OhioLINK-OCLC Collection and Circulation Analysis Project 2011,” www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2011/2011-06r.html.
8. Lizanne Payne, “Print Archiving Infrastructure and Major Initiatives in North America,” CRL Webinar, September 21, 2011, www.crl.edu/sites/default/files/d6/follow_up_material/payneCRLwebinar_09_21_11rev.pdf.
9. Terry Koch, “Print Retention in the Central Iowa Collaborative Collections Initiative,” paper presented at the ALA Midwinter Meeting, Chicago, IL, January 30, 2015, https://ci-cci.org/files/2015/02/KOCH_PAN2015.pdf.
10. Print Archive Network ALA Midwinter 2015 Meeting Agenda, www.crl.edu/events/pan-ala-midwinter-2015-chicago-il.
11. ConnectNY Shared Print Archive Project, November 21, 2013, http://connectny.org/about/projects/shared-print-archive-project-oct-2012/.
12. Midwest Collaborative for Library Services Michigan Shared Print Initiative (MI-SPI), www.mcls.org/about-mcls/collaborative-projects/michigan-shared-print-initiative-mi-spi.
13. Kirsten Leonard, “Shared Print in Indiana,” paper presented at the Indiana Library Federation meeting, Indianapolis, IN, November 17, 2014, www.slideshare.net/KirstenLeonard/shared-pring-in-indiana-kirsten-leonard-ilf-nov-2014.
14. Central Iowa Collobarative Collections Initiative, https://ci-cci.org/.
15. Cooperative Journal Retention, Association of Southeastern Research Libraries, www.aserl.org/programs/j-retain/.
16. Amy Wood, “Ceres Funds 16 Agricultural Digitization Projects,” May 28, 2013, www.crl.edu/news/ceres-funds-16-agricultural-digitization-projects.
17. Center for Research Libraries’ Global Resources Law Partnership, www.crl.edu/collaborations/global-resources-partnerships/law-library-microform-consortium.
18. NELLCO Preserving America’s Legal Materials in Print (PALMPrint), www.nellco.org/?page=palmprint.
19. Print Archive Network, www.crl.edu/programs/print-archive-network-plan.
20. Center for Research Libraries Print Archives Preservation Registry, http://papr.crl.edu/.
21. Jacob Nadal, “Endangered Species and Dangerous Metaphors,” www.jacobnadal.com/431.
22. Andrew Stauffer, “About Booktraces,” www.booktraces.org/about/.
23. Council on Libraries and Information Resources, “2014 Funded Projects: Hidden in Plain Sight,” www.clir.org/hiddencollections/awards/for-2014.
24. Constance Malpas, “A Mega-Regional Perspective on Print Books in Southern California,” paper presented at the Shared Print Collections Southern California Mega-region Meeting, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, December 12, 2012, www.slideshare.net/malpasc/so-cal-mega-region-final.
25. Innovative Interfaces LINK+ Member Libraries, https://csul.iii.com/screens/members.html.
26. Kaitlen Smith, “CLIR Appoints Hannah Standing Rasmussen as Research Fellow for the Committee on Coherence at Scale for Higher Education,” www.clir.org/about/news/pressrelease/HannahRasmussen.
27. Ben Showers, “A National Monograph Strategy Roadmap,” www.jisc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/a-national-monograph-strategy-roadmap.pdf.
28. Robert Kieft and Lizanne Payne, “Collective Collection, Collective Action,” Collection Management 37, no. 3-4 (July 1, 2012): 137–152, doi:10.1080/01462679.2012.685411.
29. HathiTrust Print Monographs Archive Planning Task Force, www.hathitrust.org/print_monographs_archive_charge.
30. University of California, California Digital Library, “Shared Print,” www.cdlib.org/services/collections/sharedprint/.
31. Mark Stover, “A Tale of Two Mega-Regions and Many Systems: The Californias and Shared Print Projects,” paper presented at the ALA Midwinter Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, January 24, 2014, www.crl.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/misc/PANALAMW2014_Stover.pptx.
32. SLC Shared Print Feasibility Study, http://scelc.org/Shared-Print-Feasibility-Study.
33. Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust (EAST), “EAST Regional Project,” www.fivecolleges.edu/libraries/regionalproject.
34. Ben Showers, “A National Monograph Strategy Roadmap.”