1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

Collaboration

“[I]f the last few decades of library and information developments have taught us anything, then it’s surely that the really significant advances, and the most meaningful and lasting solutions, are cooperative ones. And more than that: they are tending to become global ones. MARC, AACR2 and even the Internet itself, are obvious examples of this, and there are many others; and the rise of consortia of every kind is testimony to the growing recognition of the value—the necessity even—of interinstitutional cooperation, at both local and international levels. […] I hope we can all agree that, even where we are in competition, we also have a mutual self-interest in helping to build systems and processes and models and service-delivery solutions that are based on cooperatively-agreed solutions and standards.”12

“It’s possible for people of varying levels of technical skills to build useful tools and applications in a spirit of informal collaboration and fun; that software development doesn’t have to involve a lot of top-down planning, RFPs and whatnot.”13

Here are some key points about collaboration made by people OCLC interviewed:

• Smaller institutions should work together on institutional repositories because we’re too small to have our own.
• Joint use of libraries is something smaller institutions need to look at—combined academic libraries, combined school/public libraries, combined public/academic libraries.
• Libraries need to collaborate to create “whole cloth” collections irrespective of location or holding library.
• Libraries should explore the affiliations of their parent institutions for funding and collaboration opportunities—alumni are more likely to support activities related to special purposes.
• Centrally-stored (i.e., at the state or national level) materials that can be repurposed might be sensible.
• Shared preservation is crucial—can we get by with ten copies instead of 500?
• We need way more collaboration among museums, libraries and historical societies to present coherent collections.
• Historical societies could be much more visible by partnering with public libraries to digitize local historical materials.
• Collaboration comes with a cost—institutions have to share priorities, and coordination takes staff time.
• We need to share off-site storage and do collaborative collection development—there’s too much for any one institution to do.
• A collaboration between the city and the public library only increases the value of the library.
• Overlapping public libraries—county and city—need to collaborate to decide how to maximize strengths and not duplicate work and collections.
• Local history collections often are not all that unique. The material is elsewhere—local historical society, university library, state library—and so inventories must be done before expensive digitization projects are done.
• OCLC’s role is to provide interinstitutional collaboration—be a collaborative not a cooperative.

Library Landscape: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15