Valerie Horton
The previous chapter dealt with standard management issues that are common in libraries, businesses, and nonprofit organizations alike. Consortia managers perform many activities that are unique. These special services are offered to participating libraries and are often the main reason the consortium exists. As stated in chapter 2, the six services most commonly offered according to a number of consortia surveys were training, shared electronic content, group purchasing, physical delivery, consulting, and shared integrated library system (ILS). This chapter goes into detail about these six functions as well as others such as digital libraries and institutional repository functions. More on these topics can be found in the case studies section. The purpose of this chapter and the case studies is to provide a clear picture of the current activities of library consortia as well as to allow existing consortia to compare their services against consortia norms and learn about potential new services to offer participating libraries.
Cataloging
In 1976 about 15 percent of consortia reported providing cataloging services to members.1 By 2007 a large nationwide consortia study did not even ask about cataloging. In our 2012 study, only two consortia reported doing contract cataloging. While these studies suggest that many consortia no longer offer professional cataloging services, there are still some cases where cataloging support has great value. This is particularly the case for consortia with union catalogs where there is a strong desire to have quality bibliographic records in the system or for larger consortia that offer it as a pay-for-service to members upon request. The pay-for-service model includes retrospective cataloging, ongoing current cataloging, and special projects such as assistance with metadata creation or switching to Resource Description and Access (RDA) or the Library of Congress’s Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BibFrame).
Consulting
Consultant have a broad mandate that includes everything from weeding collections to new building design to handling book challenges to technology training. Consultants in consortia are trainers and event organizers, and they may also work virtual reference shifts. These employees are often on the road at participating libraries or at other library events. Consultants need to have a wide variety of library experiences and a passion for learning because much of what they do is learned on the job. To the wider library community, the consultant is an important personal connection back to the consortium.
Consultants are asked to address a broad range of issues—basically any issue in any library that may come up. It is not uncommon for consultants to specialize in specific areas such as supervision, technical services, school librarianship, or technology. Managers should tell these employees not to fake knowledge if they don’t know a subject area. It is far better to learn what they need or provide a referral to someone else who can help with a particular problem. In this author’s opinion, it is better not to allow consultants to become involved in a given library’s human resource problem or board conflict. In situations in which lawsuits are likely, it is best to refer to professional ombudsmen, lawyers, or organizations that specialize in human resource management. State library staff also can be good sources for legal help.
Like continuing education professionals, consultants tend to be fiscal loss leaders. Since consultants tend to be professional librarians, salaries can be high. Consultants need substantial travel budgets, mobile communication technology, and time and resources for personal skills development. In times of retrenchment, consultants, like trainers, are often the first to be laid off. However, these layoffs come at a high price. Without employees dedicated to the outreach function, a consortium can become isolated from member libraries. Rehiring these employees is recommended as soon as funding becomes available.
Continuing Education and Training
Continuing education has been a bedrock service of consortia for a long time. Continuing education events can cover multiple topic areas or a specific service function such as metadata creation. Conferences typically cover multiple topics; for instance, a conference might cover patron privacy, the reference interview, RDA record creation, and trends in customer service. Training is often related to the key services of the organization, such as support for a shared e-book system or appropriate use of a delivery service.
Training staff are typically professional librarians who are often technologically savvy or have extensive professional expertise. Trainers need the best communication and presentation equipment that the organization can afford, as well as access to resources to develop their own skills as a trainer. The best trainers tend to be engaging, creative, and experimental in providing information to member libraries. There are a number of organizations that support library trainers, such as ALA’s LEARN Round Table. Becoming a trainer is a great way to learn the skills that are critical in the profession and can be a stepping stone to advancement.
Continuing education rarely makes any revenue for consortia. Training is far more likely to be subsidized by the organization than to be a secure revenue source. The costs to support training activities are quite high, and unfortunately, the library marketplace cannot handle high registration fees. A quality training course, if developed internally, can easily take a week or more to create. Paying outside trainers to offer courses can easily cost thousands of dollars a day. Plus there are the costs of marketing, technology, facilities, training materials, travel and accommodations, and refreshments.
Online training has become popular to reduce travel costs for both trainers and attendees and achieve greater geographic penetration. Most library consortia offer webinars. In fact there are so many webinars offered these days that training events may start losing value for attendees. Blended learning training includes a combination of in-person, online, and self-paced training. Short training videos are popular but require expertise to develop and can be difficult to keep current. The same is true for self-paced tutorials. Most training surveys find that respondents want a range of different training methods offered. Providing multiple training methods can add complexity and cost but also is most likely to meet the needs of the widest variety of participants.
In organizations that are retrenching, continuing education is one of the first items cut. Unfortunately cutting training, like cutting consultants, can create a negative spiral. There are always new people coming into member libraries that need to be trained to keep up the quality level. Nonexistent or inadequate training programs have a direct impact on the consortium’s perceived value by member libraries. Balancing the costs versus the need for staff training is difficult, but it is also a critical function for the library consortia manager. To learn more about continuing education, consider Staff Development: A Practical Guide, edited by Andrea Wigbels Stewart, et al., or Workplace Learning & Leadership: A Handbook for Library and Nonprofit Trainers by Lori Reed and Paul Signorelli.
Cooperative Collection Development
Cooperative collection development (CCD) can be defined as two or more libraries coordinating or sharing the development of a materials collection. Historically many academic consortia have attempted to create CCD models. Many of these early attempts were journal-based and had only limited long-term viability. Perception of local needs and leadership changes often derailed early attempts at building collaborative collections.
Today, with so many shared ILSs, sophisticated physical delivery systems, and electronic and digital resources, there has been a significant expansion in CCD. A study done by cooperating libraries in 2010 found that they were able to “provide compelling evidence for the value of collaborative purchasing to library administrators and university officials.”2
The California Digital Library’s Shared Print Collection aims to “further optimize the management of information resources for students and faculty by reducing unnecessary duplication, leveraging shared assets . . ., and expanding the information resources available system-wide, while meeting the information needs of library users at each campus,” according to its website. However, the real action in cooperative collection development is with electronic resources. Many academic libraries are participating in multiple e-resource collections through different consortia projects. Many of these services are now doing demand-drive acquisitions, which allows patrons to help build e-collections.
CCD has also expanded into the public library marketplace. States like Wisconsin, Colorado, and Kansas offer shared e-book collections for public libraries. These collections of popular materials are particularly beneficial to small and medium-sized libraries who gain more buying power for their limited resources. Libraries contribute to these collections through acquisition formulas that are often based on a population served, though some states use federal or state funding to build these collections. The major criticism of these collections is availability for high-demand titles. Typically there is a formula to buy more copies of popular titles; for instance, for every five patron hold requests, a new e-book is purchased. However, it can be still difficult to buy enough of any given title during its initial popular surge.
E-resources are driving a renewed interest in cooperative collection development that is likely to continue to grow. In fact, e-books can become the foundation for new cooperative ventures that use shared collections as a stepping-stone to greater cooperation between participating libraries. CCD and demand-driven acquisition is changing so rapidly that journal literature or blog posts remain the best way of learning more about this topic.
Cooperative Purchasing
Cooperative purchasing is a complex and vital part of many consortia. In fact, many consortia started as cooperative purchasing ventures and later expanded to other services. The economics are clear: the more libraries joining a cooperative purchase, the more leverage negotiators have to reach better deals. Databases and e-resource packages make up the bulk of cooperative purchases; there are hundreds of databases available in the marketplace. A number of consortia arrange for discounts on purchasing furniture, technology, and supplies. Some consortia go further and serve as technology support for member libraries. In this case, the consortium owns and maintains electronic equipment that is placed in participating libraries.
A typical library may purchase from multiple consortia. According to The Medical University of South Carolina Library’s website, it purchases from the following organizations: National Network of Libraries of Medicine, LYRASIS, Southeastern Atlantic Regional Medical Library Service, Consortium of Southern Biomedical Science Libraries, Digital Information for South Carolina Users, PASCAL, Library Director’s Forum of the South Carolina Commission of Higher Education, Science Direct Project, Charleston Academic Library Consortium, Fort Johnson Cooperative Agreement, Bioengineering Program with Clemson University, and AHEC Information Services. For a large library, purchasing from 13 consortia is not unusual, and even small public libraries typically have access to databases from more than one source.
Much has been written on the big deal database purchases. With big deals consortia negotiate multimillion dollar packages for hundreds, if not thousands, of scholarly titles. While there is some dissatisfaction with the contents of these packages, the savings are often substantial. Lately, some organizations have created wide deals. In this scenario, several consortia join together to negotiate the deal, creating even larger purchasing blocks (see Case Study 5, Embracing Wide Deals). The growing trend toward open-access titles may start changing the publishing landscape, but for the foreseeable future it is likely that many consortia will continue to negotiate the big deals for member libraries.
Consortia also provide many niche databases on everything from auto repair to genealogy to health care to learning a language. Typically, the consortium takes a small percentage off the discount from vendors as a fee for service. Some consortia also charge membership fees tied to participating in cooperative purchases. For others cooperative purchasing revenue is the main income source. Depending on cooperative purchasing revenue can be problematic, as there is more competition in this marketplace, especially among academic libraries. In addition some vendors appear to be tightening discount schemes, making the margin of revenue even smaller. Diversifying funding sources should be a major effort of any manager who finds cooperative purchasing to be the main revenue source for her organization.
Digitization Services
A digital library is a collection of objects stored in digital format. Typically this content includes photos, posters, newspapers, audio files, letters, maps, oral histories, historic documents, reports, postcards, yearbooks, diaries, books, and more. These objects come not just from library collections but also from cultural heritage institutions such as museums, archives, historical societies, and art museums. Many are primary source materials.
HathiTrust, Europeana, Internet Archives, and the Digital Public Library of American (DPLA) are all large digital libraries. Some of these digital libraries hold the digital objects; others provide searching of metadata that links to the home location of the digital object. For example, DPLA aggregates the metadata from a growing number of regional digital catalogs. DPLA also includes exhibits from an expanding list of hubs including the Digital Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Kentucky Digital Library, and the Mountain West Digital Library, among others. DPLA also aggregates content hubs, which contain access to vast collections from the Smithsonian, New York Public Library, Harvard University, the National Archives, and HathiTrust.
Many consortia or regions are also building cooperative digital catalogs; at this writing at least 30 states have some kind of digital library. Many of these libraries were built upon digitized collections of historic photographs or newspapers. Some states have been lucky enough to get state funding to build historical digital collections; others have depended on grant funding. It makes sense to collaborate on digital services given the expertise required to develop and use format requirements such as metadata standards. Expertise is also required to know digital scanning technologies and to organize and display digital objects in a patron-accessible manner. Outreach, training, and marketing are typically included in consortia services that support digital libraries.
New trends in digital libraries include building exhibits, preservation of digital objects, and opening collections to patron-developed applications. Many digital libraries are reaching out to the user community, soliciting comments on digital objects held in their collection as well as actually collecting personal histories or stories from patrons. The future of these digital consortia is uncertain because sustainable funding is not uncertain.
ALA’s Association of Specialized and Collaborative Library Agencies (ASCLA) Collaborative Digitization Interest Group members have helped pioneer many of the metadata and digitization standards that are now norms, and the group is worth joining. There are a number of books on digitization, including Anna E. Bulow and Jess Ahmon’s Preparing Collections for Digitization, Diane Kresh’s The Whole Digital Library Handbook, and Allison Zhang and Don Gourley’s Creating Digital Collections: A Practical Guide.
Institutional Repositories and the Library as Publisher
Institutional repositories (IR) are digital collections that house, preserve, and disseminate the intellectual output of a research institution. IRs typically include faculty research papers, preprints, theses and dissertations, datasets, documents, and other objects of importance to an institution. Some institutions use the IR as a source for displaying special collections materials including image, audio, and video files. Many institutions place copies of their own policies, contracts, minutes, newsletters, and reports in the repository. IRs can also be used to store teaching resources, serving as a place for students to find faculty-generated materials such as course notes, and a space for student projects or student organizations.
IRs are often valued as a method of providing cost-controlled access to scholarly materials, or as some would say, to wrestle monopoly control from for-profit publishers and high-fee scholarly societies. But repositories also help to expand research awareness by showcasing all of an institution’s scientific, social, and achievements in one place. An IR allows a library to facilitate development of a research institution’s intellectual property while retaining the publication rights to the author’s work.
Several consortia have attempted to leverage the price of building and maintaining an IR by hosting it centrally, while others allow each participating institution to customize the IR to their own needs. The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries hosts seven institutions, including one public library, in their repository. The Alliance’s website states, “Our purpose is to help member institutions preserve and provide access to digital assets of enduring value that are critical to their work in research, education, and cultural heritage.” The Alliances’ list of services includes training, documentation, best practice guidelines, technical support, and metadata preparation assistance. The California Digital Library’s (CDL) IR website states its goal is to “manage, archive, and share its valuable digital content.” CDL focuses on the ease of placing items in the IR, the value of sharing the information with others, the IR’s ability to meet data sharing and preservation requirements of grant-funded projects, and on the long-term preservation of the valuable and unique collections.
IR services are specialized and are often limited to academic consortia, although there were some early attempts to use IR systems to collect local community-generated materials. For more information on this topic, read Md. Zahid Hossain Shoeb’s Institutional Repository Planning and Implementation: Strategic and Technical Issues, or Jonathan A. Nabe’s Starting, Strengthening, and Managing Institutional Repositories.
Libraries and consortia have been slow to jump on the “library as publisher” bandwagon. The Library Publishing Coalition claims over 55 percent of academic libraries are developing or offering publishing services. Both public and academic libraries are teaching patrons how to publish online, often using open-access publishing software. Public libraries also have a long history of publishing local print monographs or shorter chapbooks of interest to their communities. What’s new is that a few of these libraries are now using print-on-demand equipment like the Espresso Book Machine to print patron monographs. In a few cases, consortia support publishing in libraries by providing training, Espresso machines, or access to software systems. The Douglas County Library System (CO) has created a model for hosting locally created content that is gaining the attention of consortia. Several consortia, such as CALIFA, MARMOT, Amigos Library Services, NC LIVE, and the State of Kansas, are experimenting with similar platforms.
While still few in number, some library consortia are becoming publishers. Several library science journals are managed by consortia or associations. Collaborative Librarianship, for instance, is supported by two Colorado consortia. SUNY’s Geneseo is publishing 15 open-access textbooks a year with librarians serving as editors. (See Case Study 6, Open SUNY Textbook Program.) To track trends in academic publishing check out the Library Publishing Coalition, self-described as a community-driven initiative to advance library publishing.
Integrated Library Systems
Most shared ILSs are run by consortia, and ILS support is one of the more common reasons for the creation of new library consortia. Libraries are choosing to join cooperatives to lower costs or spread costs out among many libraries, to end in-house hardware maintenance, to join resource-sharing systems, and to gain the advantage of deeper collaboration with nearby libraries. Marshall Breeding, in his 2011 annual review of the automation marketplace in Library Journal, predicted that a growing number of libraries would choose to join shared systems in states without a mandated regional ILS system. In Colorado, prior to 2009, 34 percent of public libraries were using either a shared catalog or sharing in a catalog that consolidated separate holdings into a large union catalog (e.g., MARMOT, Prospector). By 2013, that number had grown to over 65 percent of public libraries.
There are four primary types of cooperative arrangements for shared catalogs:
1. Separate systems: In this model a consortium maintains multiple copies of a catalog system, and each participating library has their own use of the software. This model ensures the highest level of autonomy but still provides some cost sharing. The drawback with this model is that it is difficult to allow easy patron-centered resource sharing. WALDO is an example of this model, running an academic version of Koha for libraries in the Northeast.
2. Separate systems linked into a union catalog: In this model each library maintains an integrated library system, but the data is harvested on a regular basis and added to a union catalog, which allows for resource sharing. Examples of this model include Prospector, Contra Costa, and OhioLINK.
3. Union catalog (members retain item ownership): All members add records to one union catalog, attaching their holdings data to a single bibliographic record shared by the cooperative. Ownership of the individual item remains with the originating library. There are many examples of this model, including PINES, MnPALS, and AspenCat.
4. Union catalog (shared item ownership): A new trend is for library e-collections to be shared by the collaborative, instead of residing with the originating libraries.
For consortia, an ILS is a popular and important service that requires significant staffing. Skilled staff is required to support the software, network, and hardware. As a result, a number of consortia are moving toward purchasing network and hardware support from remote vendor sites. Typically, libraries participating in a shared ILS are provided with technical assistance, troubleshooting, and training by the cooperative. Membership committees are used to build guidelines, policies, and best practices.
Pricing is always an issue within cooperative ILSs. Whether an ILS is run by a library or by a consortium, these systems remain expensive. Historically library venders have not offered a significant price break for cooperating libraries. As a result many consortia have moved to open-access systems such as Koha, Evergreen, or the new Kuali OLE. No matter what type of system is selected, convincing members that they must pay an adequate amount to maintain a high-quality system and support for that service can be a challenge.
Physical Delivery
An OCLC report explains that “end users generally don’t see the point of finding things they can’t get.” This point can be missed by library staff focusing on creating patron discovery systems.3 The report asserted that, “the end user’s experience of the delivery of a wanted item is as important, if not more important, than his or her discovery experience.” Delivery is a critical piece of the resource-sharing cycle that we refer to as discovery to delivery.
Many consortia provide physical delivery services. A 2008 survey found that 30 states had delivery services, and “anecdotal evidence suggests that almost all of the lower forty-eight states have one or more couriers in operation within their state boundaries.”4 Almost every major public or academic library system has an internal delivery service. In many cases these systems connect to other consortia-run delivery services, creating a hub-and-spoke network. Some cooperative delivery services are limited to a specific city or set of academic libraries; others provide statewide service, and a few systems cross state lines, such as the long-standing delivery network that includes Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas (see Case Study 7, Interstate Library Delivery). Delivery drivers visit area libraries, and they may be the representative of the consortium that is seen most frequently. The courier driver becomes the face for the organization, which can be problematic because many consortia outsource delivery to commercial vendors.
Some academic systems need rapid delivery and use more expensive services such as United Parcel Service (UPS) or Federal Express (FedEx). Surprisingly some consortia don’t provide delivery in support of existing resource sharing. In these cases, members end up having to ship with the expensive and slow United States Postal Service (USPS). A series of three Colorado-based surveys conducted over ten years all found substantial savings to participating libraries that used that state’s courier system. In 2012, for example, the Colorado delivery survey found that moving nearly six million items a year costs $900,000, much less than the $4,700,000 it would have cost to ship by USPS or the $8,000,000 it would have cost to ship by UPS or FedEx. The studies can be found at www.lrs.org/2012/03/13/high-traffic-low-cost-the-colorado-courier-continues-to-save-libraries-millions-annually-in-shipping-charges.
For many years, physical delivery had skyrocketed. For example, Massachusetts saw a 38-fold increase in deliveries over 21 years. This trend has changed in recent years, with most libraries couriers reporting flat usage or slight declines. The exception to this trend is when a resource-sharing networking adds a new direct patron-placed requesting system. Allowing patrons to request items always causes a large borrowing surge. Other trends in delivery include expanding multistate delivery and automated materials handling. To learn more about delivery, join ALA ASCLA’s Physical Delivery Interest Group, or check out Moving Materials: Physical Delivery in Libraries by Valerie Horton and Bruce Smith. Chapter 6 goes into more detail about physical delivery services.
Resource Sharing
Depending on how the resource-sharing service is established, it can be one of the largest staffing units in a consortium. Some cooperatives manage interlibrary loan systems, coordinate with other partner organizations, and run a delivery service with only a few staff members. In other consortia, the staff may actually find and retrieve requested items in addition to the tasks mentioned above. In such cases staffing may be substantially larger. Overall, many changes are occurring in resource sharing. Chapter 5 goes into this topic in depth.
Consortia Support Agencies
There are a few organizations that provide support for consortia. ASCLA typically presents a number of programs geared towards consortia management at most ALA conferences. ASCLA’s Consortia Management Discussion Interest Group meets at the annual conference and is a good place to meet colleagues. The group focuses on funding, advocacy, and services for all types of library cooperatives. LYRASIS often hosts a consortia meeting at the ALA annual conference as well as hosting an additional annual meeting elsewhere in the country. Topics are selected by attendees.
Another significant and helpful resource for consortia managers is the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC). This informal self-organized group is unaffiliated with any organization, though LYRASIS generously provides help with logistics. It is international in scope and has both small and large consortia members that serve all types of libraries. At this writing, ICOLC has approximately 200 member consortia, most from North America. The website lists ICOLC’s function as “facilitating discussion on issues of common interest. Twice per year ICOLC conducts meetings dedicated to keeping participating consortia informed about new electronic information resources, pricing practices of electronic information providers and vendors, and other issues of importance to directors, governing boards, and libraries of consortia. From time to time ICOLC also issues statements regarding topics which affect libraries and library consortia.” At ICOLC meetings a consortia manager can meet peers, learn about new trends and services, and discover what other organizations are doing.
Conclusion
The previous two chapters highlighted most major functions of library consortia as identified in several recent surveys. However the list is not meant to be exhaustive. A number of consortia operate in niche roles providing one very specific function. Amherst College’s high-density storage device service is an example, and we have included a case study that examines it.
Other consortia that engage in many common services may also provide one unusual service. SUNY’s e-textbook system is an example of a rather unique service, and we have included a case study of it. The Massachusetts Library Networks’ temporary employment service also provides a unique service. In chapters 3 and 4 and in the case studies, we have provided a snapshot of the range of vibrant services offered to libraries by their consortia.
1. Denis M. Davis, “Library Networks, Cooperatives and Consortia: A National Survey,” 2007, www.ala.org/offices/sites/ala.org.offices/files/content/ors/lncc/interim_report_1_may2006.pdf.
2. Denise Pan and Yem Fong, “Return on Investment for Collaborative Collection Development: A Cost-Benefit Evaluation of Consortia Purchasing,” Collaborative Librarianship 2, no. 4 (2010): 183–192.
3. Karen Calhoun, et al., Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want: An OCLC Report (2009).
4. Valerie Horton and Bruce Smith, Moving Materials: Physical Delivery in Libraries (Chicago: American Library Association, 2010).