Collaboration: A Strategy for Organizational Success
Letter from the Executive Director, November 2025
There are many strategies for adapting to challenging times in the life cycle of an organization. One can turn inward and scan across the business for ways to trim excess and reduce costs. Unfortunately, this approach often diminishes the organization’s capacity or service levels. In the end, there’s an upper—or perhaps better described as the lowest—limit to how much one can cut. This could spiral to the point where there’s nothing and no one left to cut aside from someone whose job it is to turn out the lights. One might bet heavily on growth, but that may or may not materialize. A third approach is to seek new partners and find ways to collaborate to build scale, develop new service models, and simultaneously reduce costs. While not always the simplest approach, it has the benefits of both the cost-cutting and savings part of the first strategy as well as the potential for better services or operations through shared approaches to solving problems.
The work of most associations is to foster collaboration and engagement among their members. Standards development organizations, such as NISO, are particularly framed around this goal. Through the collaborative consensus process, standards organizations allow peer organizations to learn from each other, share approaches to solving problems, reduce frictions and increase interoperability. Collectively, this process ideally frees resources that can be focused on true differentiation, innovation, or service development. This month, NISO is proud to release another project output that not only is the outcome of our consensus efforts, but is also centered on the topic of collaboration: a draft for public comment from the Cooperative Collections Lifecycle Project (CCLP).
This project is a product of a diverse collaboration, involving a great deal of peer engagement across our community. With nearly 100 volunteers spread across nine groups and three work streams, the CCLP project is among the largest efforts undertaken by NISO. With generous support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), this three-year project has included research work undertaken by Ithaka S+R, technical prototype development, and the work of a NISO project to develop a recommended practice. The research report by Ithaka S+R was released back in 2024. The prototype work was demoed earlier this year,and the team is now seeking partners and resourcing to further develop a working implementation. This month, NISO has released the draft Recommended Practice Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Infrastructure Project (CCLIP) for public comment through early December. The groups hopes that the framework described in this draft will enable innovation on a shared foundation of data exchange and decision-making frameworks. We welcome feedback on the draft.
Over the years, there have been many attempts at cross-institutional collaboration for managing elements of the collections process. Networks such as the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), Center for Research Libraries (CRL), HathiTrust, the Ivies Plus Confederation, the Boston Library Consortium (BLC), the Eastern Academic Scholars' Trust (EAST), MetaArchive, and Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP) have piloted variations on this approach, each with varying levels of success. The CCLP initiative has sought to overcome the many barriers to wider implementation, including the lack of available vendor-neutral interoperable systems, adequate governance and decision-making frameworks, and assessment tools. By gathering experience related to various components of the collections workflow—from selection to acquisitions, discovery to preservation— the project sought to describe how institutions can effectively manage this process across institutional boundaries. This draft report covers each of these areas and provides guidance on how those tools can be implemented.
Working through a consensus project is only one method by which NISO fosters collaboration. Another is focused on education and thought leadership through bringing people together to share ideas and discuss potential solutions. The main forum for this at NISO is the NISO Plus Conference, which will take place next February in Baltimore. This unique forum is driven by participant conversations rather than presentations and is focused on the goal of producing impactful outcomes. Several NISO projects got their start in the discussions that take place during the meeting. We’ve received several dozen session proposals, and the planning committee is in the process of putting together a compelling program, which will be announced soon. NISO has also announced Dr. Alondra Nelson, the Harold F. Linder Chair in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and former Acting Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as this year’s recipient of 2026 Miles Conrad award. Dr. Nelson will present one of the highlights of the conference, the annual Miles Conrad Lecture. I’m looking forward to hearing her perspectives on the topics of science policy, AI systems, and open science. Registration is now open for the meeting. You won’t want to miss out on the initial stages of the collaborations that will begin there!
Collaborations, whether they be standards projects, collections management partnerships, or thought-leadership gatherings, should be assessed by their impacts. The NISO community has had a great track record of creating value for our industry. I expect that the CCLIP recommendations as well as the outcomes of the NISO Plus conference will continue to add value for publishers, libraries, and the companies that support them both. Of course, collaborations require involvement and engagement to succeed. We need you all to participate and foster their implementation.
Sincerely,
Todd Carpenter
Executive Director, NISO
