A New Guide From Ithaka S+R: Governance and Business Models for Collaborative Collection Development

Governance and Business Models for Collaborative Collection Development was published today by Ithaka S+R.

The guide was written by:

• Tracy Bergstrom
  Program Manager, Collections and Infrastructure
• Oya Y. Riegerart
  Senior Strategist
• Roger Schonfeld
  Vice President, Organizational Strategy and Libraries,
  Scholarly Communication, and Museums

DOI: 10.18665/sr.321102

From the Introduction:

Libraries have a long and strong tradition of joining forces to accomplish goals that are beyond the reach of a single institution. As Lorcan Dempsey has identified, libraries collaborate—often through consortia—in order to build capacity, scale influence, and leverage collective solutions. However, collaborations should not be viewed as a panacea. Building successful partnerships is a demanding undertaking. To be effective, library collaborations focused on collection development need to be responsive to the changing landscape of scholarly resources as well as the evolving nature of research, teaching, and learning. The purpose of this report is to further increase our understanding of the governance and business characteristics of collaborative collection development initiatives, and how the attributes of different business models can affect the outcomes of collaborations. We intentionally focus on governance models as they provide a strategic framework in support of decision making, implementation, stakeholder engagement, business planning, and sustainability, which are all fundamental to building a strong scaffolding for collaboration.

Collection development collaborations involve a lifecycle of activities, from developing policies and best practices in support of selection, acquisition, licensing, and description of materials to facilitating discovery, access, conservation, and preservation. They share common goals including:

• Scaling influence in negotiations with service and content providers to secure better terms and pricing and foster advocacy in scholarly communication
• Coordinating cooperative purchasing of electronic resources
• Developing new systems, applications, or workflows to deliver effective collection-based services that are often beyond the reach of a single institution
• Facilitating resource sharing among member institutions through interlibrary loan programs and reciprocal borrowing privileges
• Supporting efficient use of collection storage and preservation space and related staffing through joint facilities and services
• Engaging in disaster planning to develop strategies to conserve and preserve collections
• Supporting distributed print and microfilm archiving
• Supporting institutional and subject repositories for digital materials through implementation of joint content management and preservation systems
• Supporting the development and management of open educational resources
• Sharing expertise to exchange ideas, keep up with new developments pertaining to different facets of collections, and facilitate training
• Developing joint strategies for supporting new program areas
• Offering professional development, leadership forums, and information exchange

This guide presents a series of takeaways and examples to illustrate the characteristics of successful collaborations as well as the potential risks they face. Rather than focusing on enabling technologies, we consider how collaborations start, evolve, function, engage members, and are sustained over time. To inform this guide we closely observed eight collaborations within the United States and Canada:

• Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust (EAST): Founded in 2015, EAST’s more than 170 members together work to secure the print scholarly record in support of teaching, learning, and research, maximize retention commitments, and facilitate access.
• HathiTrust: Launched in 2008, and now with 213 supporting members, HathiTrust’s mission is to contribute to research, scholarship, and the common good by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge.
• Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation (IPLC): IPLC is a voluntary union of 13 academic libraries with strategic priorities including collaborative collection development, resource sharing and discovery, and leadership to change the scholarly communication system.
• Ontario Council of University Library (OCUL): OCUL, an academic library consortium with 21 member libraries, supports collective purchasing, shared digital information infrastructure, advocacy, assessment, and professional development.
• Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID): With over 1,200 members, ORCID is a global initiative to enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and affiliations.
• Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN): Founded in the 1930s, TRLN is a collaboration of four research libraries from North Carolina committed to marshaling members’ financial, human, and information resources through cooperative efforts.
• Virginia’s Academic Library Consortium (VIVA): Founded in 1994, VIVA, a consortium of 71 academic libraries in Virginia, supports cooperative purchasing, shared e-resources and print, and open and affordable course content initiatives.

In addition, to examine collection development collaborations in area studies, we explored three Southeast Asia initiatives:

• Center for Research Libraries Global Collections, Southeast Asia Materials Project (SEAM): Established in 1972, SEAM preserves and provides access to rare or unique resources from Southeast Asia by microfilming or acquiring films of topical materials and has 27 members.
• Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia (CORMOSEA): Established in 1969, CORMOSEA is composed of 17 research institutions to enhance and coordinate national efforts to collect and disseminate research materials on Southeast Asia.
• Library of Congress Cooperative Acquisitions Program for Southeast Asia (CAP-SEA): Established in 1962, the CAP-SEA program acquires, catalogs, and distributes content from countries that are essentially unavailable through conventional acquisition methods.

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