
Library Discovery Directions
29 June 2020
Lorcan Dempsey
In this foreword to the edited collection Resource Discovery for the Twenty-First Century Library (2020), Lorcan Dempsey traces shifting trends in the library discovery environment contributing to the diversified scope of resource discovery.

La facilitated collection: una riflessione sulle collezioni come servizio
21 April 2020
Lorcan Dempsey
The post considers how the contract termination between the University of California and Elsevier has signaled a change for our scholarly communication models.

Reflections on Collective Collections
16 January 2020
Brian Lavoie, Lorcan Dempsey, Constance Malpas
Collective collections are the combined holdings of a group of libraries, analyzed and possibly managed as a unified resource. Constructing, understanding, and operationalizing collective collections is an increasingly important aspect of collection management for many libraries. This article presents some general insights about collective collections, drawn from a series of studies conducted by OCLC.

Operationalizing the BIG Collective Collection: A Case Study of Consolidation vs Autonomy
20 August 2019
Lorcan Dempsey, Constance Malpas, Mark Sandler
The proposed framework recommends strategies for advancing the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s (BTAA) collective collections toward a more purposeful coordination of their print collections. It defines four traits of a purposeful collective collection that can also apply broadly to other consortium settings.

What Collaboration Means to Me: Library collaboration is hard; effective collaboration is harder
19 March 2019
Lorcan Dempsey
Dempsey argues that library collaboration is important—especially in a network environment, where scale is key for efficiency and impact—and must be a strategic focus for libraries and partners. Library collaboration is hard; this paper analyzes why and offers suggestions for improvement.

University Futures, Library Futures: Aligning library strategies with institutional directions
18 October 2018
Constance Malpas, Roger Schonfeld, Rona Stein, Lorcan Dempsey, Deanna Marcum
This report proposes a new library services framework for academic libraries in place of a collections model. This report studies the relationship between emerging library service paradigms and different university settings and surveys the importance of library service areas according to library directors.

Academic Library Futures in a Diversified University System
25 June 2018
Lorcan Dempsey, Constance Malpas
The future of academic libraries is transitioning from a collections-based model to a more diffuse services-based model. A new model of excellence for libraries will need to be plural, based on strategic fit to the needs of the institution they serve and not on collection size or gate count.

An Exploration of the Irish Presence in the Published Record
20 February 2018
Brian Lavoie, Lorcan Dempsey
OCLC Research identified more than 1.6 million distinct Irish publications using library collections data in WorldCat and mapped this information with DBpedia to trace shifting cultural patterns over time. This report analyzes distinctive features of Irish publications to examine the Irish influence on the collective public record.