College, consortium, collaboration, collective collection

This presentation was to provide BLC Directors with some context for thinking about collective collections, which is a topic of discussion within the consortium. A discussion of institutional directions within the consortium, based on past work from the University Directions, Library Directions project began the conversation. This provided the groundwork for a discussion of shared priorities within the group before discussing several different models of consortium activity, outlined in Lorcan Dempsey’s Powers of Consortia blog series. Building on the BIG Collection report, a discussion on the general challenge of collective action in a consortium setting followed: what are the benefits and tradeoffs of working together on shared infrastructure, shared collections, shared expertise, etc.? In the closing section, collective collections were explored as an example of a collective action problem, focusing in particular on the kinds of decisions, choices and actions that are needed to make collection sharing successful.