Bob Kieft
“A National Perspective on Shared Print Activities”
May 21, 2012
Trends in Collaborative Collection Development

Introduction: Maine Shared Collections Strategy is emblematic of the trends.

A. Three things to keep in mind when we talk about collection development

1. We tend to equate collection development with buying new things, but we should remember that this activity also includes making new collections out of old (e.g., digitizing special collections and presenting them on the Web), repurchasing content in digital form that we have in print (e.g., journals), (re)selecting items for archiving or redeveloping local collections into collective collections, etc.

2. A library is many things and different things to different users. Under the influences of forces that everyone well knows, libraries and their partners are changing the balance among these.

1. a set of materials available to clients,
2. staff and services built on or around those materials and their access,
3. spaces and tools, which are increasingly electronic, for interacting with and using materials and services,
4. a node in a network of related institutions and organizations, incl. museums, archives, publishers, content aggregators, etc.,
5. a cultural and educational institution,
6. a social or common space for learning and an expression of communal commitment to knowledge creation, dissemination, and use.

What to do about the first of these is prompted by or implicates the others; it implicates services and workflows, staff jobs, librarians’ self-image and their place in the institution, etc.  So what we’re talking about today isn’t only the things on the shelves or at the end of the blue link.

3. I am trying to talk these days about:

1. the continuum of materials access media and arrangement;
2. materials use

rather than a) “collections” and b) “reading” because I’m not sure how useful “collection” is any more as a description of what is available to our constituencies, and “reading” is only one of the things that people do with the materials.

B. Trends

1. Where things are going, what will the end state of current changes  be (Kieft did not for reasons of time discuss this point but referred the audience to an article that he and Lizanne Payne have written and is entitled “Collective Collection, Collection Action” that will appear in vol 37, July 2012,  of Collection Management). Summary:

• Locally held print materials, except for special collections, will become less important as e-text comes to be preferred by most users/readers for most purposes and texts, which means that it will matter much less than it does now where a print title is held and that libraries will pay less attention to individual item selection both because of DDA/PDA programs and access to large libraries of e-texts (aggregated journal collections and monographs);
• information systems will consolidate;
• libraries will achieve a greater degree of formality in defining their relationships as required by their deeper dependency on each other (the challenge will be to build lightweight agreements on the trust relationships that already exist through old-fashioned resource-sharing experience rather than on strenuous and time-consuming attention to legal niceties), which will mean overcoming the influences of different jurisdictions and funding streams that support the members of the collective.

Maine is well down the road to this future, which is less an adjustment to current exigencies of budget and space, less a deeper flirtation with cooperation, than it is a commitment to dependency, a strategic repositioning of the library community around collectives that better support users.

2. Generalizations about the state of play and trends; a list of themes based on surveys of and interviews with liberal arts college library directors in 2011 and 2012, recent conversations with representatives of consortia, and a reading of planning documents and reports from the last six-none-months. These points underscore the points made by Lizanne and Constance.

 

• the sense of the library remains local for users and librarians (some directors say that the best way to serve their users is by having things onsite, that faculty and others prefer it that way);
• where there is a history of resource sharing, reinforced by shared or linked library information systems and rapid materials delivery, there is greater potential for collaboration on or federation of collections (a substantial percentage of colleges in a recent informal survey cite the lack of regional or statewide partnerships/systems/delivery like CBB or Maine InfoNet as the reason why they cannot engage in collaborative collections activities);
• collective approaches to journals are well underway; adjustments to the Federal Depository Library Program are needed before major work can be done with gov docs; monographs are a tough collaborative nut to crack;
• that said, there is a lot of thinking or speculation about the advisability of redeveloping local print monograph collections into archived collectives, with the thought that collections will be archived in place rather than in collective housing, in other words, that library open stacks will in many cases serve as partners’ off-site housing facilities;
• there is frustration with the possibilities for buying new general collection print materials but a lot of energy around consortial ebook purchasing (which has its own frustrations as publishers seek business models);
• there is less attention to thematic (as CRL is doing with law and agriculture materials) than to general archiving;
• changes are coming in collections as practical responses to local budgetary and space issues rather than taking up grand schemes or “reinventing” the library, except perhaps at the ARL level;
• in collectives it’s easier to slow print growth than reduce the size of the existing print collection, easier, that is, to fail to buy something new than it is to divest of the old; DDA/PDA or collective approval plans are ways of slowing the growth;
• there is an argument that technology is “replacing” books as we repurpose spaces in the library (see the brouhaha over the proposed remodeling of the New York Public Library’s 42nd St research library);
• there is a need for leadership by individual people who have a purpose; this is hard because such people could appear to be telling their colleagues what to do;
• need for easier ways of analyzing collections/holdings so that individual libraries can make new purchasing decisions or decide whether to replace/withdraw titles; of assigning archival responsibility; of disclosing archiving responsibilities in local and national databases, etc.

3. Where to watch for trend development outside of Maine.

Kieft did not cover this point for reasons of time. Here is a list in alpha order (Valerie and the grant project team are well aware of these, and Lizanne mentioned some of these):

 

• ARL: the Transforming Research Libraries program has a 21st-Century Research Collections Task Force that on May 17 released a report (http://www.arl.org/news/pr/21sttfreport-17may12.shtml); read it against the 2005 Janus agenda (http://ecommons.library.cornell.edu/bitstream/1813/2608/1/Atkinson_Talk.pdf);
• CDL (California Digital Library): planning for archiving monographs in place; reviewing monographic series; adjustments to collective journal list and print backup of e-journals; some discussion of collective prospective acquisition on monographs. In California, the state university system is beginning to talk about a joint housing/archiving pilot project and the members of SCELC (mostly smaller and private colleges but some California State schools and USC) are beginning a collection analysis project;
• CRL (Center for Research Libraries): in addition to work on collective collections and development of a collection analysis system, enlarging role as service provider and hub of activity;
• University of Florida: leadership in development of shared high-density housing for the state; collaborative digitizing and archiving of gov docs; development of consortial policies and governance for collective archiving;
• GWLA (Great Western Library Alliance): 30+ libraries, 75% of them ARLs west of the Mississippi, beginning a monographic collection analysis;
• MCLS (Midwest Collaborative for Library Services): several mid-size college libraries  and one ARL in Michigan working with Sustainable Collections Services to assign archiving responsibility for monographs (http://sampleandhold-r2.blogspot.com/2012/03/mcls-and-scs.html);
• Minitex: library consortium in Minnesota  thinking about building deeper collections collaboration/archiving on their MLAC (Minnesota Library Access Center);
• NERD (New England Regional Depository): a discussion about how the Five Colleges, Inc., in MA can expand their collaborative offsite housing facility into a regional program;
• OCLC: will they realize the promise of WorldShare systems and a collection analysis tool?;
• OhioLink: a pioneer in large-scale shared collections, now working on ebooks, deduplicating print depositories (where contributed items become the property of the depository) and whether they can bring private colleges into the depository system; ongoing discussion of maximum copy thresholds based on some years of experience of all libraries using YBP as vendor;
• Orbis Cascade Alliance:  have established a “gentlemen’s agreement” three-copy-max guideline; ebook program underway; they need a shared library system (decision pending); shared approval or other collective purchasing program for print monographs has proved elusive.

4. Aspects of the MSCS that will be contribute to the end state referred to at B1:

• combining various kinds of academic libraries with public libraries; ingest into a the Maine consortial archiving system of the kinds of materials that public libraries buy and academics do not is a first and a potential boon to future scholarship;
• improving information and collection analysis systems and developing and documenting decision-making strategies that result in a large, heterogeneous group;
• standards for retention/preservation notes for monographs;
• documenting the costs of a large archiving project;
• after the strategy is developed and implemented, which could be some years yet, measures the demand for print materials and the trends in costs of moving books around;
• testing of the data that indicate a high degree of unique holdings. That is, is the high level of uniqueness real or an artifact of cataloging practices?

Three projects I would like to see someone do:

• design an LIS collection development course or write a textbook that proceeds from an assumption about collective collections rather than includes a unit or chapter on collaborative collection development;
• study the effects on the demand for pbooks of the presence of ebooks;
• study the effect on the demand for print collections, local or consortial, of online education.