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Library cooperation in the 21st century Sharing resources and managing the library in new ways Sponsoring cooperative learning Gates, OCLC to develop campaign More cooperation enhances WorldCat Managing the collective collection Statistics from cooperatives worldwide Download this issue (2.77 MB pdf)
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Managing the collective collectionThe next major stage in library collaboration will require a changed view of print collections, one that acknowledges the primacy of on-demand access in the online environment and the need to mobilize physical inventory more effectively across a much wider audience of users By Jim Michalko and Constance Malpas For more than a century, library cooperation in the United States has enabled individual libraries to realize cost savings while expanding the reach of local collections and services. Great economies of scale have been achieved through cooperative approaches to resource description, access and delivery that rely on a combination of shared policies, operating practices and infrastructure. This article examines the underlying framework for library cooperation and identifies emerging requirements for a new approach to managing what has long been regarded as the core institutional asset of any library: its physical collections. Recent work by OCLC Research helps to show how libraries can advance to a new level of cooperation and achieve even greater operational efficiencies by managing these resources as a shared asset. This is what we refer to as Managing the Collective Collection. Shared Policies Interlibrary lending has been at the center of library cooperation for many years and represents the most successful collaborative effort to impact both libraries and their users at a significant scale. The growth of communication and transportation systems in the early part of the 20th century enabled a rapid increase in the volume of inter-library loan activity. It was the introduction of a parcel post service by the U.S. Post Office that provided the necessary infrastructure for large-scale resource sharing, by dramatically reducing the costs of transporting library materials from point to point. However, what enabled libraries to quickly take advantage of these transport services was a set of shared policies and understandings that governed the interactions between institutions. These policies created a level of community confidence and shared expectation that allowed interlibrary lending to take advantage of every successive wave of communication and transportation innovation throughout the twentieth century.
Shared Operating Practices The creation of union lists and the emergence of geographically-based cooperative cataloging represent major milestones in 20th century library collaboration. Union lists of books and periodicals provided a system-wide view of library resources, increasing the discoverability of collections, while the division of labor in regional cataloging hubs made it less expensive to describe those resources. This kind of collaboration was made possible because libraries had developed common descriptive practices that were codified in formal cataloging rules. Shared standards of practice helped to establish common expectations of library service and corresponding patterns of institutional investment. They also enabled subsequent process automation, which was critical to the development of a shared service infrastructure.
Shared Infrastructure As communications technologies advanced and computing became more generally available in the 1960s and ‘70s, the scope of library collaboration increased. This was the period when OCLC was founded and cooperative cataloging was automated in order to reduce the costs associated with duplicate work. The capital costs of computer technology at the time were significant and building the infrastructure to support a distributed cataloging environment demanded a cooperative model. OCLC was established to enable an equitable distribution of investment and return on cataloging costs across the library community. WorldCat provided the shared infrastructure necessary to support global participation in an efficient resource-sharing network.
For decades, shared policies, workflows and infrastructures have enabled individual libraries to contain operating costs and effectively release the value of locally held collections to an ever-widening universe of users. Today, as an increasing proportion of library-owned content moves into the online environment, successful models of library cooperation will require an additional component: a framework for managing print book and journal collections as a shared asset. Shared Assets With the expanding scope and variety of online media, social and scholarly behaviors that were once supported by physical library collections and spaces have increasingly moved to the Web. Large-scale electronic publishing and the retrospective digitization of millions of print books and journals have produced new centers of gravity around which users congregate with little attention to institutional provenance or ownership. In this environment, the once distinctive value of locally held print collections has rapidly diminished as the line between discovery and delivery is blurred: the increasing ubiquity and rapidly evolving feature-set of digital collections has largely displaced print as the value-center of the library.
A number of library-driven initiatives now seek to coordinate the production, preservation and delivery of digital collections as an aggregate resource. The best of these efforts will result in operational efficiencies and cost savings supported by shared policies, procedures and technical infrastructures. Yet, as the library community strives to develop cooperative strategies for building and managing digital content, it must also grapple with the opportunity costs of continued investment in legacy print collections. There is considerable redundancy in the system-wide book collection, even among libraries with a long history of successful resource sharing. For example, recent research on aggregate holdings in a state-wide academic collection has found an average of more than four copies per title, a rate of duplication that far exceeds circulation-based demand. By managing this collective collection as a shared asset, libraries can achieve significant cost reductions, improve access services and maximize the return on institutional investments. The next major stage in library collaboration will require a changed view of print collections, one that acknowledges the primacy of on-demand access in the online environment and the need to mobilize physical inventory more effectively across a much wider audience of users. In the long term, this may entail a large scale redistribution of library resources, with a small number of repositories serving as hubs in a distributed delivery network. As before, this next phase in the evolution of resource sharing will rely on a common framework of shared policies, operational procedures and infrastructure. OCLC is actively pursuing a range of research and development efforts that will position it to extend the cooperative infrastructure in support of this next transformation of library service. 1. Malpas, Constance. 2009. “Shared Print Policy Review Report.” Report produced by OCLC Research. Published online at: http://www.oclc.org/programs/publications/reports/2009-03.pdf 2. Payne, Lizanne. 2007. “Library storage facilities and the future of print collections in North America. “ Report produced by OCLC Research. Published online at http://www.oclc.org/programs/publications/reports/2007-01.pdf
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