NISO Publishes the Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Infrastructure Project (CCLIP) Recommended Practice
Baltimore, Maryland, June 2, 2026: The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) is pleased to announce the publication of the Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Infrastructure Project (CCLIP), NISO RP-46-2026.
The Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Infrastructure Project (CCLIP) is a NISO Recommended Practice that is part of the IMLS-funded Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project (CCLP) (LG-252384-OLS-22) co-led by NISO, the Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration and Innovation (PALCI), and Lehigh University Libraries. Networks of libraries have a long tradition of working together to expand their collections and provide more comprehensive coverage across all subjects through sharing of resources. To support these strategies, larger networks of institutions have recently explored wider adoption of cooperative collections management, which this project defines as a process by which networks of institutions work collaboratively to acquire, manage, circulate, and preserve collections across the network. The CCLP seeks to overcome serious barriers to wider implementation, including the lack of available vendor-neutral interoperable systems, adequate governance and decision-making frameworks, and assessment tools.
Together, the CCLP and the resulting CCLIP Recommended Practice aimed to enable the efficient selection, management, and sharing of collections by developing a framework that libraries and consortia can use to share expertise, data, and collections to efficiently steward limited resources in serving library patrons.
CCLIP supported several working groups working in concert with the CCLP Steering Committee and with one another on the Recommended Practice. Seven groups—Acquisitions, Assessment/Data Analysis, Cataloging/Metadata, Collections Development and Selection, Consortia, Infrastructure, and Organizational Strategy and Governance—representing 72 individuals across partner organizations developed the Recommended Practice.
“At a time of increasing financial pressures and growing demands on libraries, collaborative stewardship is becoming more important than ever. CCLIP offers a framework that can help institutions and consortia share expertise, coordinate decision making, and make more effective use of limited resources in service to researchers and learners,” states Boaz Nadav-Manes, University Librarian, Lehigh University, and co-Principal Investigator of the CCLP IMLS grant.
“We intend to put this work to immediate use, informing our future consortial initiatives, tool development, and the governance structures that will support them," said Jill Morris, PALCI Executive Director. "The breadth of participation in the development of this Recommended Practice across libraries of every type, publishers, software providers, and service organizations substantially shaped our collective thinking, and we are grateful to every contributor who brought their perspective and willingness to collaborate on the challenges the library ecosystem faces.”
Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director, added, “The publication of the Recommended Practice represents a critical step in realizing the goal of the broader CCLP project: to facilitate collaborative practices across institutions and support greater access to library resources. We’re excited to see the efforts of our CCLIP Working Group volunteers come to fruition, and we thank them for their efforts.”
The CCLIP Recommended Practice is freely available on the NISO website: https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/cclip.
