Scope
Libraries around the world see collaboration as a viable solution for providing access to a wide range of information resources and collections. Initiatives such as the US Ivy Plus Confederation - a union of 13 academic libraries working together to improve discovery of and access to information by leveraging their collective assets - have already served as a proof of concept. Changes in the economic environment mean that these sorts of adaptations will become more commonplace, if not essential to ensuring that library services are efficient, effective, and engaging. In this roundtable discussion, practitioners and decision-makers will discuss what is needed to effectively manage collaborative collections and emerging support needs. What work needs to be done? What kind of systems would be useful? What hurdles need to be overcome?
Confirmed Speakers include Miranda Bennett, Director of Shared Collections, California Digital Library, Andy Breeding, Senior Product Manager, OCLC; Boaz Nadav-Manes, University Librarian, Lehigh University; Susan Stearns, Project Director, Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust (EAST); and Maurice York, Director, Library Initiatives at Big 10 Academic Alliance.
Event Sessions
Speakers
Todd Carpenter, Executive Director of NISO, will moderate the discussion.
The discussion by participants touched on the following:
The library community is full of collaborative efforts. So let’s begin by setting the landscape and describing the types of collaborations that exist in our community. In what ways are organizations participating in collaborative efforts? Can you give us some examples of successful collaborations from your perspective?
Having engaged in collaborative work in the past, what are some of the greatest opportunities before us?
What are some of the biggest barriers to collaboration?
There are technical barriers to collaboration and then there are social barriers. Neither is easy to solve. Let’s talk about the social barriers that inhibit collective work and how we can overcome them. What are the drivers of successful collaborations?
How have collaborations formed and grown in your area? Have the started at the grassroots level, been driven by executive leadership, been small efforts or started fairly broad?
How collaborative efforts function over time has a lot to do with how they are governed. In your experience are there approaches to governance that have worked reasonably well or that might have created issues with the project that could have been avoided?
What are some of the values that collaborations can foster in our community?
When participating in a collaborative initiative, what are some of the trade-offs between independence/autonomy and consistency of approach and efficiencies necessary to collaborate
Part of these trade offs are achieved by having a clear understanding of vision and goals. How do groups set those goals and what is the best way to approach setting and, if necessary, updating those goals?Before setting out on a collaborative effort, do you have any advice about key decisions, or boundary setting, or frameworks people should consider at the outset?
We’ll end with a focus on standards, since this is a NISO program of course. Do you have any suggestions for best practices around how collaborations should be created, managed, or assessed?
Related Information and Shared Resources:
Call for Participation for NISO CCLIP Project Working Groups - Following its grant award from IMLS to support the Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project (“CCLP”), NISO announces that the work item for the Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Infrastructure Project Recommended Practice (“CCLIP”) has been approved by its Voting Members.
HuMetricsHSS - HuMetricsHSS is an initiative that creates and supports values-enacted frameworks for understanding and evaluating all aspects of the scholarly life well-lived and for promoting the nurturing of these values in scholarly practice.
Additional Information
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