Cooperative solutions arise from great challenges

By Sara Mudd and Andy Havens

Shortages are an inevitable by-product of social and economic turmoil. In times of war, resources become scarce and are often repurposed from civilian to military uses. Everyday business practices—from production to transportation to distribution channels—are disrupted.

During World War II , libraries in the United States suffered the same shortages and rationing as other industries, but also experienced difficulty acquiring international materials. To cope with this situation, several prominent librarians initiated a proposal for shared collections activities that came to be called “The Farmington Plan.”

This plan proposed that “libraries having research collections join in a cooperative undertaking to bring to this country and make available … at least one copy of every book and pamphlet published anywhere in the world … that might reasonably be expected to have interest to a research worker in America.”

The plan also addressed concerns over the growing cost of creating individual collections in a world where the body of scholarly works was growing more and more rapidly. Writing in 1942, Julian Boyd, Princeton University Librarian and one of the formulators of the Farmington Plan, said, “The Library of Congress believes that libraries can render [their unique services] more usefully by pooling their strengths rather than competing with one another.”

The hardships that resulted from that war were extreme. The cooperative response to overcoming the challenges facing libraries during that time was remarkable.

Working together to solve difficult common problems and share resources is nothing new to libraries. But now, almost a decade into the 21st century, we can see that increasing technological and social changes impact how all individuals and groups cooperate. Coming from a long tradition of sharing, libraries may be better-suited than other industries to benefit from increased cooperative opportunities.

The tools are changing

Any cooperative system requires participants to ask and answer two basic questions: What do I give? and What do I get? Even when a venture offers basic benefits overall, each participant must feel as if he or she gains something unique from the arrangement. The ability to share more broadly and creatively may not always equate to an appreciation for all of the requirements of cooperation. And while many groups and individuals work to embrace new tools of cooperation more fully, the challenges presented by rapid change can impede the realization of shared benefits. In this environment, libraries may be in a unique leadership position—by leveraging the profession’s history of cooperation to help other industries and organizations, libraries can guide others as they work to overcome collaborative barriers.

The new ways in which libraries are deconstructing the boundaries of cooperation can be instructive within the library community, and outside it. Traditionally, challenges to cooperation can be organized into four broad categories:

• Geographic — barriers of physical distance
• Cultural — differences in goals, methods, constituencies and philosophy
• Organizational — limits of process, bureaucracy
• Financial — costs and benefits of working together

Recent successes in these areas illustrate the changing nature of cooperation, and also new methods and opportunities. How librarians embrace change, while maintaining fundamental values of cooperation, may largely determine the success of the industry in coming decades.

Geography — cooperation conquers distance

Once a prohibitive factor in achieving effective collaboration, geography hasn’t ever been, in and of itself, a cooperative deal-breaker. As shown by the Farmington Plan, libraries have shared materials internationally for many years. The cost and time involved, though, often made participation an inverse function of distance. Recent Web-based technology and digitization of materials allows organizations to build shared solutions across a greater scope of interests and applications.

Participating AMICAL Libraries

When the American International Consortium of Academic Libraries (AMICAL) formed in 2004, it banded together 18 universities in 18 countries—from North and sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Russia and Central and Western Europe. These universities, all modeled after liberal arts colleges in the U.S., found themselves geographically isolated in terms of resource sharing opportunities. Because they didn’t fit into existing local library networks, they came together to create their own unique paradigm for cooperation to better fulfill their users’ needs.

Soon after its inception in spring 2006, AMICAL unveiled the pilot program, RESPOND (Resource Sharing Project for Network Discovery). Fourteen of its 18 members volunteered to participate (the institutions that didn’t participate cited bandwidth issues, not lack of interest).

The goals of project RESPOND included:

• Make resource sharing among AMICAL’s membership feasible
• Create a group catalog
• Enable access to OCLC’s global network
• Analyze collections using a Web-based service

In the case of AMICAL, a shared philosophy came together with Web-based technologies and passion on the part of the staff to create cooperative possibilities for all of the institutions in the consortium. Jeff Gima, Director of AMICAL, provided this detailed anaylsis of the results:

“When we first began the RESPOND project, I thought that plugging into OCLC’s ILL network was going to be the big benefit for AMICAL members. For some of our libraries, that’s been true: the universe of accessible scholarly materials has been broadened significantly, and ILL operations are increasingly automated and more efficient.

“Improved ILL stats are nice, but for many of our libraries, the most important results have been more qualitative: RESPOND is often bringing a combination of improved quality and technological innovation in our library services that would have been out of reach otherwise. Through this partnership with OCLC, we’re not just helping our users find and get materials through WorldCat; we’re putting our library staffs in touch with peers, trainers and experts to adopt standards-based practices for cataloging and ILL; we’re giving them analytical tools to better manage their collections as a whole; and we’re offering them library technologies, like WorldCat Local “quick start,” that many would not be able to develop or implement on their own.

“We’re connecting our libraries to each other and to a worldwide network, broadening access to scholarly materials and providing access to platforms on which our libraries can more effectively share resources with the world—and more effectively share resources with their own users.”

Technological cooperation clearly enabled AMICAL to better serve its users and create a richer professional environment for its librarians. But for users who are not as well-connected, creative ideas make it possible to share materials more widely even in the absence of advanced technology.

In Kuala Lumpur, libraries are conducting a pilot program where staff go door-to-door to visit rural residents, offering a sampling of reading materials available for them to borrow. This grassroots effort is just one element of a larger campaign to increase reading among Malaysians—and it’s working. In 2005, Malaysians read an average of two books per year. Today, that figure has increased to about 12 books per year.

In this case, the geography that cooperation conquered is much smaller, yet no less formidable. Libraries have invested tremendous amounts of money, time and effort amassing and organizing physical materials. Creative thinking and a willingness to go to where the need is greatest has enabled more people than ever to take advantage of what these Malaysian libraries offer.

Take-away: The number of technological methods of cooperation are increasing continually. But while picking the right tool is important, having a shared vision and goals among participants is even more so. Tools will change over time … the relationships and value you build can last much longer.

Culture—cooperation conquers difference

Technology can help bridge geographic gaps. But can it help us cross cultural boundaries? In an ever-more-wired world, communities often cling more tightly to the differences by which they define themselves. Sharing across different cultures—whether they are regional or professional—is often more challenging than sharing across oceans.

When it comes to cooperation between traditionally disparate types of libraries, Australia, with more than 120 joint-use libraries, provides a great example. Public libraries in school buildings have been a practical necessity to address the geographical challenges of widely dispersed, rural communities.

In the U.S., though, the concept of joint-use libraries has met opposition in many cases, taking several years of lobbying to obtain approvals and funding. The Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and its public library counterpart, Dayton’s Bluff Branch Library, came together in 1996, agreeing that they should lobby for funding to build a joint facility. Legislation finally passed in 2002 to build the facility, which opened to students and the public in 2004.

“It took a long time for us to get to the point where members of the public could use university resources and members of the university community could use public library materials, and both groups could intermingle freely in one facility,” says David Barton, Dean of the Library at Metropolitan State University, “but once we did, it proved successful from the outset and continues that way more than five years later.”

Library cooperation can also cross traditional business and industry boundaries. Take the case of the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL). In May of 2008, BPL began a pilot program with UPS to deliver interlibrary loan materials between branches, rather than using a library delivery vehicle. The results have been a success—cutting down on delivery time and costs.

John Vitali, Deputy Director, Business Administration, Brooklyn Public Library, put it this way:

“As an organization that serves the 2.5 million people of Brooklyn, it is important that we are able to accommodate all of our customers’ borrowing needs as best as we can. That is why the partnership between Brooklyn Public Library and UPS is vital; to ensure our customers can borrow materials from any of our 60 locations, and have them delivered to their neighborhood library as quickly as possible. Thanks to UPS, customers can request holds on materials and retrieve materials within 24 hours of the hold being placed.”

As Leslie Crutchfield, Managing Director of Ashoka and co-author of Forces for Good, wrote, “Great nonprofits work with business; no longer content to just see capitalism as the root of all evil, or business as just the enemy; they see business as a potential force for good. The best nonprofits that we studied—eventually, no matter where they started out in the spectrum—became highly engaged, and worked through business to advance their cause.”

Take-away: More inclusive thinking about customers and partners can increase opportunities for cooperation. Being “neutral” in terms of business competition and having learning as a key brand attribute also positions libraries to partner with the for-profit sector as a driving force in innovation. This is a key strength that libraries should consider as they look to form cooperative ventures in the future.

Organization—cooperation conquers bureaucracy

On the surface, the mutual purpose of resource sharing across AMICAL’s member institutions seems obvious—but the intricacies of initiating cooperation among individuals in 14 different countries presented some interesting challenges. Language issues, project management styles, time zones, training, feedback and systems integration strained organizational resources. Not only did these issues impact workflow and other processes, the libraries’ collections also needed to address some very practical challenges, such as the use of many non-Roman script fields in their records, including Greek and Arabic.

AMICAL’s participating libraries chose WorldCat as a group catalog platform. Because their bibliographic data are dependent on the complete contribution of local records, the libraries were confronted with some unexpected delays. From managing limited staff time to reconciling different institution policies, organizational challenges added new dimensions to an already complex task.

Said Elisabetta Morani, of John Cabot University (Rome, Italy):

“Our library worked in almost total isolation without contacts at any libraries. The AMICAL consortium was a wonderful tool to build a new vision of librarianship and interlibrary cooperation, which I think is still the most important outcome for JCU participation.

“Initially, the RESPOND project contributed in creating a sense of urgency for the standardization of our records. We went to our administrators saying that a nonstandard catalog had no future and that we would not have been able to participate in RESPOND if we kept the old catalog.

“The RESPOND project has provided important opportunities for training, and I expect that this aspect will be relevant also in the future. It has introduced us to OCLC services like Connexion and WorldCat. For the future, I certainly see possible benefits in collaborative collection development analysis. Through WorldCat, the visibility of our library has grown both internationally and locally.”

For this level of inter-organizational collaboration, staying flexible—loosening up on institutional standards for the benefit of users—was a key to success. The more dynamic and innovative a cooperative opportunity may be, the more it will rely on changing workflows, intensive training and new tools. Emotionally, this translates into shifting collective mindsets. Participants may need to relinquish established protocols in order to reach common ground.

Another example of intra-organizational cooperation: the University of Michigan Press has recently restructured and is now an academic unit under the university’s Dean of Libraries, Paul N. Currant. Instead of being a stand-alone corporate entity, this reorganization positions the press as a pioneer in digital publishing, aligning it more closely within the university’s library organization, whose mission it is to spread research as widely and freely as possible.

“We are moving beyond spatial limitations and moving toward providing readers and researchers with information wherever they are, and whenever they need it,” said Mr. Currant.

As a separate entity, the press had a business model that simply wasn’t viable. The reorganization has allowed for closer coordination between the press and existing University of Michigan publishing services. The move has also allowed the press to focus more on digital monographs and print-on-demand reprints of out-of-copyright books from its digitized collections, as well as thousands of books from other sources.

Take-away: When cooperating across organizations, transparency among partners is key. Trying to hide difficulties will only lessen the potential for success, and may alienate those who are best positioned to help.

Finance—cooperation conquers cost

In Fayetteville, Arkansas, a green economy is emerging. The Fayetteville Public Library is collaborating with many local groups to test solar technology on its roof. Within a year, a 48 solar panel system, designed by University of Arkansas engineering students, will be installed on the library. The system will produce energy for the library and electrical grid and will serve another purpose—to be a test bed for locally developed solar technologies, such as more efficient inverters being developed at Arkansas Power Electronics International.

“It’s a convergence of the business community, the city, the library, the university and the state—people and organizations coming together to do something really innovative for the library, the community, the local economy and the planet,” said Louise Schaper, Executive Director of the Fayetteville Public Library.

This might seem like a strange match at first, but when you list the benefits, they paint a picture of a very strong paradigm for future library cooperation. The library:

• Reduces its utility costs while matching their needs (electricity) with a unique resource (a really big roof).
• Is the talk of the town, tapping into new groups of potential library users and supporters, including university students, residents and businesses.
• Invests in, supports and promotes local businesses.
• Is an active participant in the community’s economic engine.
• Is seen as a driver of innovation through cooperation.
• Provides a place where residents and businesses can learn more about solar technologies, in this case with a display in the lobby that shows real-time information on power that’s being produced. The library is, thus, positioned as a learning lab.

Had the library looked at the simple financial issue—electricity costs—as a stand-alone challenge, they would have probably been unable to afford the final solution. Many libraries and small businesses do not have the necessary funds to jump straight into solar power.

Take away: Examining financial challenges from a cooperative mindset yields very interesting possibilities. The simple question, “How can we save money on XYZ?” can be expanded to be more inclusive:

• What other industries and businesses have an interest in these costs?
• What other social and business issues are involved?
• Who in our community is most concerned with these issues?
• What interesting or innovative resources can the library provide?
• How can we get other libraries involved?

The desire for cost savings is at the heart of many cooperative efforts. Libraries have always provided shared resources for users—and each other—thus lowering costs for all participants. Cooperative efforts aimed at improving how libraries share materials is an ongoing process. In the 21st century, however, libraries can look to expand the boundaries of financial cooperation to include partners in other industries, communities and areas of practice.

The future of cooperation

More and more people and groups are banding together using technology to creatively share interests and materials. As competition for the attention of information seekers continues to grow, 21st century libraries have more challenges—and more opportunities—to consider broad, flexible cooperative efforts.

In many businesses, cooperation is not always a natural tendency or a comfortable environment. Self-sufficiency, vendor-customer relationships and competition are more easily defined and, often, require less risk. Unlike many other industries, though, cooperation is fundamental to the work that libraries do. When institutions work together to save money and time, reach users more efficiently and deliver the unique resources that libraries, museums and archives provide, they re-prove the value of the cooperative model.

President’s Report | Sharing resources and managing the library in new ways