Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) Releases “Open Resilience: Building Infrastructure Together (ORBIT)” Landscape Scan

Title

• Open Resilience: Building Infrastructure Together (ORBIT)

Source

• Invest in Open Infrastructure

Authors

• Sarah Lippincott
• Lauren Collister
• Katherine E Skinner
• Chrys Wu

DOI

• 10.5281/zenodo.17193778

From the IoI Blog:

US-based library consortia provide an essential collaborative framework that enables academic institutions to achieve preservation, access, innovation, and educational goals that would be impossible individually. The report reveals that library consortia are stepping up as critical bulwarks against resource scarcity and service disruption among their members. Interviews with consortial leaders highlight both the urgent challenges they face—vendor consolidation, shrinking institutional capacity, and political and financial pressures—and the opportunities they see for bold collective action.

Key themes explored in the report include:

• Providing a safety net: How consortia are helping members survive budget cuts and staffing shortages.
• Cultivating mission-driven communities: Acting as conveners, connectors, and capacity-builders as well as service providers.
• Building resilient open infrastructure models: Sharing governance, risk, and expertise across institutions.
• Embracing interoperability: Ensuring access to knowledge while resisting vendor lock-in and consolidation.

The report also identifies five high-potential avenues for collective investment in open infrastructure—hosting, building, sponsoring, training, and cultivating—that could transform how libraries support open at scale.

Read the Complete Blog Post (Includes Invitation to Collective Action)

Direct to Full Text Report
25 pages; PDF.

Filed under: Interviews, Libraries, News, Preservation