Future of collaborative collection

THE FUTURE OF COLLABORATIVE COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT AMONG RESEARCH LIBRARIES Steven A Knowlton University of Memphis, April 2, 2010 Good morning, it’s great to be here in Memphis Mary asked me to speak this morning on “The Future of Collaborative Collection Development among Research Libraries.” I’ll be doing that shortly, but I thought you might like to hear a little about me and my background first I’m a graduate of the other U of M – Michigan, that is, and went on to study librarianship at Wayne State University in Detroit Since 2005 I have worked at the publishing firm ProQuest – you may be familiar with some of our databases such as ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, ABI/INFORM, and HeritageQuest My roles at ProQuest have involved what we call “consultative solutions”: that is, working closely with customers to identify their collection development interests, and finding ways that ProQuest can help meet their users’ needs While I have been working for a commercial publisher, I have also been active in library research and have had peer-reviewed articles published, as well as serving on the ALA Continuing Resources Section Committee on Holdings Information On a personal note, my hobbies include flag-spotting and playing the electric bass – I’m really hoping to make it down to the Stax studio museum and worship at the shrine of “Duck” Dunn collection development and how it’s done these days Let’s talk about: But enough about the past, let’s think about the future I’d like to get a little poll going just raise your hand if you: The key to this idea is that the cooperating libraries have to view their various collections not separately but as a larger body that serves scholars at all the cooperating institutions      Use Google Email colleagues at other libraries Use Facebook or MySpace Use wikis Pull documents from Institutional repositories Well, then, you’ve already got one foot into the future of collaborative collection development In a little bit I’ll explain what I mean, but before that we should talk about what is collaborative    Current efforts at collaborative collection development Challenges to the models in place right now How technology is both shaping efforts to respond to those challenges and making new models available And throughout, we’ll be talking about how an institution like the McWherter Library can play a role in collaborative collection development Collaborative collection development is simple in concept but more challenging in practice In concept: similar libraries at different institutions can work cooperatively to manage collections with several purposes in mind:    Achieve cost savings for electronic products by leveraging collective buying power Reduce duplication of rarely used print materials Develop preservation plans to ensure that the last copy of a title is not weeded The most common model for collaborative collection development is the consortium This idea is well-known at Memphis, because you are part of several consortia: the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries, LYRASIS, Tenn-Share Consortia often apply their efforts to the first goal of collaborative collection development, buying electronic resources in bulk Knowlton, The Future of Collaborative Collection Development Among Research Libraries Publishers will often seek out consortium deals, for a couple reasons One is short-term gains: rather than have an individual price point that forces some libraries out of the market, a consortium deal allows more libraries to subscribe, result in a cumulative value of all the subscriptions that may be greater than selling individually and losing some customers because of the higher price But equally important is exposure to new users A person’s college years are when information-seeking habits are formed – if a future researcher grows accustomed to using a particular database, then demand for that database will continue in other libraries as that researcher moves on in his or her career titles are acquired, but at the same time too many libraries don’t waste their money on books that won’t be read For example, the Center for Research Libraries is a consortium in the sense that it receives its funding from member libraries – but it collects scarce materials such as newspapers, foreign books and microfilm, and stores them in a warehouse in Chicago Member libraries call upon the warehouse to ship the materials as needed Recent initiatives of the CRL include microfilming newspapers from the African nation of Liberia, and collecting British doctoral dissertations The advantage to members of CRL is, of course, that their contributions to the CRL budget allow them access to unique materials without having to purchase and maintain them So, the consortium is one model of collaborative collection development: it does a great job of keeping prices down for commonly used resources Another model of collection development addresses the opposite problem: how to handle acquisitions of scarce but vital materials? Other efforts in collaborative collection development are organized by the Library of Congress To help with collaborative collection of foreign materials, the Cooperative Acquisitions Program operates branch offices around the world to gather hard-to-find materials in places such as India, South America and East Africa, and make them available to participating libraries Think of it this way: libraries often buy books on the “just in case” principle – let’s get this book in a field our researchers study, “just in case” someone needs it And the result is that libraries hold a lot of books that never had the “just in case” occasion arise It’s a pretty common finding in library use studies that books on the shelf don’t circulate much: one group of Connecticut libraries discovered that over half its books hadn’t been checked out once in the last decade One seemingly outdated but still surprisingly useful tool is the National Union Catalog The NUC is a gigantic set of books containing copies of the catalog cards for virtually every book held at a large research library in the United States before 1956 This tool allowed libraries to determine whether a particular scarce book existed anywhere in the country, so they could borrow it rather than purchasing another copy The reason I say it’s still useful is that many libraries never completely converted their card catalogs into online versions – so that more than a quarter of the titles in the NUC aren’t found in web-based catalogs And that’s just books that a librarian honestly believes somebody will use There are lots of books that one researcher in a million wants – covering the minutest subset of knowledge in an esoteric discipline So most libraries won’t even bother with the obscure stuff But really, somebody needs to have those obscure books on hand, for that Ph.D student who’s chasing down his last bit of data on the post-structuralist critiques of the hermeneutics of quantum gravity And that’s why libraries collaborate to make sure this type of material gets collected somewhere, but definitely not here And speaking of web-based catalogs, the last tool I’ll discuss for avoiding duplication of obscure books is the OCLC WorldCat database Libraries who are members of OCLC – and that includes most university libraries in America – upload their holdings to a massive database hosted by the OCLC organization in Dublin, Ohio (just outside Columbus – and the original There are a number of initiatives to insure that the most important of the obscure and foreign Knowlton, The Future of Collaborative Collection Development Among Research Libraries home of Wendy’s hamburgers) All the other libraries can use WorldCat to find limitedinterest books and borrow them through interlibrary loan run available to researchers Communication about holdings is key to making this idea work It’s not all upside to this kind of collaborative collection development, however Libraries have long relied on that wonderful experience called serendipity – when you find one item you need in the catalog – then go to get it off the shelf and find another book right next to it that will also serve your research There’s no serendipity in interlibrary loan – you just have to hope that the catalogers and indexers assigned the kind of headings your researcher is looking under But hopefully some good bibliographic instruction is going on and researchers are also learning how to use citations to get to the resources they need Interlibrary loan: I’ve said the dreaded words The drawback to all the efforts I’ve just described is, of course, that relying on other libraries to hold titles means they have to be loaned via courier – necessitating a delay Most libraries feel that the tradeoff is worth is it, however – delayed access for the book that might only be used once is better than spending money on books with little anticipated use That said, collaborative collection development for scarce books is not done only by national organizations Regional groups also maintain communication in order to facilitate access – such as the California Cooperative Latin American Collection Development Group This group of ten university libraries meets twice a year to discuss which libraries are planning to acquire materials in which areas of Latin American studies, and thus make appropriate acquisitions plans to avoid duplication For example, one library may collect Caribbean serials, and another will therefore avoid acquiring those materials A complement to the efforts against duplication of low-use materials is the establishment of informal standards to help libraries understand the materials that every collection should have The American Library Association – a body consisting entirely of librarians from various institutions working collaboratively – issues recommendations on “Outstanding” titles in various fields, such as “Outstanding Reference Sources”, “Notable Books for Adults,” and many others These lists are assembled on a yearly basis and reflect newly published titles In addition, there are ALA-sponsored lists of “Core Collections”: essential works in a field that no self-respecting bibliographer should omit Other core collection lists are available from the H.W Wilson publishing company, and many specialized library organizations such as the Medical Library Association These lists are an example of collaborative collection development because they draw on the wisdom of many experienced librarians about which titles are most important to gaining the basic knowledge of a discipline Memphis has some special collections, like the Center for Earthquake Research or the Mississippi Valley Collection, and there may be an opportunity to work with other specialized libraries to formulate collaborative collection development plans – for example, Berkeley’s National Information Service for Earthquake Engineering, or The Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections (LLMVC) at Louisiana State The drawbacks of delayed access would of course have to be carefully weighed against the savings in the acquisitions budget Collaborative collection development works well for libraries in consortia to acquire shared electronic resources, and libraries sharing information about holdings in obscure and hardto-acquire materials One last element of collaborative collection development is an area that is part of the ethical obligation of libraries, but that some users and other stakeholders may I’ve been talking about books, but print serials are another important part of this discussion Most libraries used to aim to collect a complete run of their serial subscriptions – hence the effort devoted to check-in and claims But with collaborative collection development, those lessused journals might have shorter runs at several different institutions, and still make the entire Knowlton, The Future of Collaborative Collection Development Among Research Libraries place less value upon: I’m speaking of preservation Libraries – particularly research libraries – have a duty to make sure that information is preserved, whether digitally, in paper or in microform (or clay tablets with cuneiform, if you happen to be an Assyriology library.) But that’s a budget item that can be hard to justify to the regents But another surprising truth as that many libraries don’t participate fully in the collaborative collection development organizations they belong to They may continue to purchase materials that they know other libraries already have, or they might ignore collective decisions about the division of responsibility in collecting for a discipline Several factors influence resistance to completely collaborative collection development They include: Again, collaborative collection development is part of the solution A library should never discard the “last” existing copy of an item – so when weeding decisions are being made, the OCLC database can be a handy guide to knowing whether other copies of an item exist elsewhere In this example, the library is the only one holding a copy of this book – so be extra cautious about throwing it out In addition, the vast network of librarians on blogs, emails and wikis is another way to share preservation data – I remember when the University of Hawaii suffered a mudslide, they were all set to replace a large microfiche collection by purchasing it from ProQuest – and then another institution emailed to donate its copy that they were planning to de-accession anyway A tough day for the sales rep, but an outstanding example of collaboration between libraries      Concerns about sacrificing a library’s autonomy Reluctance to rely on another institution to supply part of the collection The complexity and time-consuming commitment Fears that costs will outweigh benefits And, as we discussed, delays in meeting user needs Regarding autonomy: librarians are professionals, highly trained for independent judgment So when libraries are divvying up collection responsibilities – it may be considered slightly offensive to be told one may not buy a title – even when it’s felt that a local copy is important to have And tied to that is a perhaps reasonable lack of trust in other institutions Sure, they say they’re picking up everything of value in Puerto Rican literature, but how can we be sure? And when that professor needs that anthology of Angel Lozada or that Fall 2007 issue of Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos, will it really be available? In preserving digital materials, some libraries are faced with the daunting task of either printing out or saving to disk all the journals and database materials they subscribe to – just in case the original publisher fails to maintain the file, or the subscription terminates Fortunately, another collaborative project called LOCKSS (for Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) exists to preserve digital material automatically in a peer-to-peer network If one institution’s digital copies are corrupted, they are replaced with good copies from another institution Librarians are also busy people, and who’s got time to keep coordinating with six other libraries about collection decisions? Some would rather just go ahead and directly acquire the materials they want And finally, there’s a certain amount of concern about costs – if I’m buying all these Dominican titles, and the other library is doing Puerto Rico, how we know they’re not getting the better deal? We could be spending that money on titles we feel certain our researchers need There are other digital preservation methods, but LOCKSS is the best example of one born from collaboration between libraries From leveraging collective purchasing power, to locating scarce materials, to working together on preservation, there’s a lot that collaborative collection development is already doing in research libraries What’s to be done about lack of cooperation in collaboration? Aside from changing human Knowlton, The Future of Collaborative Collection Development Among Research Libraries  nature, only binding agreements can have an effect One method that’s been proposed in several consortia is to require all members to use the same book jobber – and to limit that jobber from selling duplicate titles within the consortium That way, member libraries couldn’t buy duplicate titles even if they wanted to I’m not aware of any consortia that have actually adopted that plan, however    A national effort to collaborate between consortia on rationalizing print holdings Joint operations between public libraries and universities Collaborative digitization to save money and improve distribution of resources Contributing to open web document portals such as Google Books and Open Content Alliance So we’ve seen some of the reasons for collaborative collection development – to save money, avoid duplication, and manage preservation – and some of the natural human impulses to distrust collaboration But the title of my talk is the future of collaborative collection development, so it’s about time we talked about that! Hey – I said technology was the second point, and a lot of these are technology solutions! Well, that’s interesting Technology is often a driver of change because it reduces cost, as well as making information more freely available In addition to these solutions, I’ll address some technology-driven changes that are less costcentered in a few minutes Like everything in libraries, there are some basic pressures and opportunities caused by outside forces that will have an effect on collaborative collection development The first we’ll address is budgets The second is technology And you’re waiting for a third, aren’t you? I’ll share a little marketing secret – research shows that people respond better to an odd number; it catches your eye because of a psychological quirk that makes us pay more attention to odd numbers than to even numbers So almost any advertisement will have or selling points But I’m not trying to sell you anything, and these two are enough to worry about As we discussed, libraries everywhere are looking for savings through collaboration One place to start is through saving space Open shelves in a library are costly – one estimate is 25 cents per book per year in overhead costs Putting the same materials in a closed storage unit drops those costs considerably, besides being better for preservation Offsite storage is becoming more accepted to researchers because collaborative collection development, with its reliance on interlibrary loan, has been part of the library landscape for several decades now, and researchers are accustomed to the wait to receive material Back to my actual point – budgets! We’re living through the worst economy since this place was called West Tennessee State, and the state government is cutting funds to universities just as almost every other state is And, not surprisingly but inconveniently – serials prices continue to squeeze the rest of the collection budget But some libraries are taking that idea farther – groups of universities in southern California, Missouri and Ohio have pooled their offsite storage collections into single buildings that serve the entire region, saving on the cost of operating separate buildings For most, that’s the extent of the savings Each library continues to manages its offsite collection within the shared building separately However, a couple groups in central Colorado and Massachusetts have begun managing their offsite collections collaboratively – for example, making deaccessioning decisions based upon the entire corpus of books in storage, managing interlibrary loan requests for the collection as a whole, and operating a union catalog – with universal circulation rights for all the Now, collaborative collection development, at least in terms of consortium buying, was intended as a salve for sore budgets But there are some other developments that have been cropping up in some places that I think we’ll see spread because they are effective cost-cutters They include:  Managing off-site storage collaboratively Knowlton, The Future of Collaborative Collection Development Among Research Libraries participating institutions This solution couples cost savings with truly collaborative collection development that serves a large community of researchers This may be a trend that gains traction – as libraries face space shortages (as they all eventually) and no funds to expand, cooperative offsite storage will become an attractive alternative Lyrasis will gather information from all its members and report back to the national steering committee of "Preserving America's Print Resources" The conversations about collection development policies will be easy, because Memphis already has well-documented policies in place The need to save costs isn’t limited to university libraries, obviously; public libraries are facing many of the some budget difficulties In a few cities, universities and municipalities have taken the bold step of unifying their libraries, including the collections San Jose State University and Metropolitan State University in St Paul, are two universities who have undertaken collaborative library projects The San Jose library is an absolutely beautiful structure with strong collections of both popular and scholarly material The goal of the joint library is to provide community members with access to the broadest possible range of materials, and to support the University’s educational mission by leveraging its collection to expand knowledge among more users It’s interesting to note that some offsite storage facilities may be quite a distance from the main library – Harvard’s is 35 miles away – so if Memphis were to undertake a cooperative storage project, collaboration with places as far away as Ole Miss or Arkansas State could be possible, as well as working with more local libraries like UT-Health Science Center, Christian Brothers University, Crichton College, Rhodes College or Lemoyne-Owen College I hope I haven’t betrayed my ignorance of some deep-seated rivalries with this suggestion Storage isn’t the only way that costs can be cut, however If holdings can be reduced through collaborative collection management, then even less space will need to be rented There is nationwide initiative that is looking to create a unique method for managing collections to reduce duplicate print holdings, called "Preserving America's Print Resources" The Center for Research Libraries recently commissioned a report on proposed methods for governance of regional and even national collections in specialized disciplines The plan is for cooperation between consortia to determine the extent of holdings nationally and to develop plans to judiciously cull unneeded duplicates and manage the remaining collections under best practices for preservation This project promises to have guidelines in place within three years, and its final outcome will be “to reduce the costs systematically and significantly and to increase the accessibility of heavily redundant serials holdings.” It promises to be an important change with massive ramifications for the holdings policies at research libraries, including this one The librarians at Memphis should be prepared for plenty of questions from their colleagues at Lyrasis about holdings, collection management and preservation practices, and local priorities The challenges of such an approach include managing a large collection for sets of users with different expectations For example, the San Jose city council recently voted down a proposal to install internet filters – an issue that is not very common in academic libraries Shared funding can have its perils as well – when budgets are tighter in one entity than another, both may suffer For example, the San Jose library had to cut its hours recently, entirely due to municipal shortages; in this case, the students at the university are enduring the consequences even though their funding didn’t fall short However, the attraction of shared space remains as a way to cut overhead and improve community outreach For universities undertaking new library construction in the future, unification with public libraries may come to be seen as an investment with long-term budget benefits Knowlton, The Future of Collaborative Collection Development Among Research Libraries Even if libraries aren’t willing to go as far as operating a shared building, universities and public libraries can benefit from collaborative collection development For example, New York University, Columbia University and the New York Public Library have an agreement allowing holders of a library card at one library to use the other libraries With that in mind, each library monitors the others’ collections and focuses its acquisitions on areas where the others are not collecting They meet once a year to discuss issues in collection management as well It’s not a formal collaboration but it does help manage costs and serve users of both universities and the public library And digitization can now be done at a lower cost to the library Lyrasis has created the Mass Digitization Collaborative – it’s a program that is operated out of Lyrasis libraries, and accepts contributions from any member library Members save the costs of setting up an inhouse digitization project, as well as taking advantage of economies of scale because Lyrasis digitizes so many documents, and the perdocument cost is lower than it would be if a library digitized its own materials Digitization saves the host library money on the costs of access – and it saves the collaborating libraries money on travel costs to view the materials Furthermore, the Lyrasis Mass Digitization Initiative eliminates redundant scanning: all the Lyrasis libraries host their digitized material in a common repository, so that documents don’t accidentally get digitized twice And of course it offers instant access to researchers Dr Ford mentioned her interest in making the McWherter library a resource for the Mid-South community beyond campus, and perhaps a more structured collaborative collection development plan with Memphis Public Library is one way to approach this goal And that brings me to the fourth technologybased cost saver we’ll discuss Earlier, we talked about how collaborative collection development cuts down on acquisitions costs by eliminating the need for cooperating libraries to purchase duplicate titles; however, it does impose the costs of interlibrary loan, which some sources estimate between 20 and 30 dollars per title Digitization is helping to eliminate even that cost, as a digitized titles doesn’t have to be checked out, sent in the mail or checked in There are a number of ways for libraries to furnish digitized material to assist with collaborative collection development Again, as budgets force libraries to reconsider how they’re spending their funds, cooperation between universities and public libraries may come to be seen as an attractive choice Storage, inter-consortial cooperation and public/university library unification are some ways of addressing budget problems for print material But many libraries are moving toward digitized materials as another cost savings That seems counter-intuitive, as digitization has a high upfront cost But if digitization can reduce other costs, it can be a cost-saver Consider the costs of access, particularly for rare and unpublished materials – such as the manuscripts in the Mississippi Valley Collection Archivists must oversee the researchers, special acid-free binding materials must be prepared, and so on And for researchers from elsewhere, the travel to Memphis is a big cost You may have heard of the Google Books program Google is working with several of the very largest research libraries – it started with Stanford and Harvard but now includes 20 libraries, including some in Europe and Japan – to digitize books on their shelves and make them searchable in Google For out-of-copyright books, the entire text may be read, but for books in copyright, only snippets are available The snippets are helpful to determine whether the book is a useful resource that a researcher wants to acquire through traditional ILL Although Google Books is a handy way to acquire digitized books, Google’s policies and practices are quite controversial, as they are scanning all If instead, materials are posted online in digital format, then access costs are reduced to the price of maintaining files on a server Not really nothing, but minimal It pays off if the costs of digitization is less than the cost of access over the next several years Knowlton, The Future of Collaborative Collection Development Among Research Libraries the books on the shelf, in copyright or not, without gaining the publishers’ permission; and furthermore, there are a lot of concerns about a commercial enterprise controlling content that originated in a library Nonetheless – if you can find a title in Google Books, that’s one ILL request you don’t have to process facing But I think we’ll see technology impact the way that librarians collaborate, as well Other digitization projects include the Open Content Alliance The OCA is also a mass digitization project, but they only scan works with the approval of the publisher Libraries contributing to OCA include dozens of research libraries around the world including many members of Lyrasis Books scanned by OCA are hosted in the same “Internet Archive” as the documents scanned by Lyrasis Mass Digitization Collaborative In addition to books, the Open Content Alliance makes available computer software, audio recordings, films and other formats You’ll recall I discussed that one of the reasons librarians may be reluctant to get involved with collaborative collection development is the complexity of organizing tasks among so many people Well, that kind of thing is a lot easier than it used to be Way back, people would actually have to go to meetings Then there were conference calls Then you could send an email and have your colleagues “reply to all” and back and forth until your inbox was clogged But now – you can set up a wiki – ask your colleagues what titles or disciplines they’re collecting, and everyone can add information on their own time, make comments on their colleagues’ choices, and by the end of a couple days you’ve got a consensus and nobody had to argue (out load, at least! – they might argue in the wiki.) Easy peasy, as Jamie Oliver says In this example, librarians at Ohio University have listed their favorite business directories Anyone with a password can log in and add an entry or make a comment on an existing entry It doesn’t have to be a wiki, per se You could use the comments function on a Facebook or a MySpace page, although that seems a bit clumsy, and Google Docs and similar programs have a functionality that allows many different users to work on a shared document that’s posted to a server In this example, after the original document was posted other users added changes, shown in pink highlight In all these ways, librarians working collaboratively can take advantage of social networking to share ideas, preferences, and priorities in the blink of an eye As collaboration becomes easier, it may make collaborative collection development more feasible I’d win no prizes as a futurist by telling you that social networking software is going to change the way people communicate But it’s still true even if it’s obvious Although Google Books and OCA represent the most truly collaborative efforts at digital collection development – because many libraries’ holdings are available together – individual libraries are expanding the reach of their holdings with Institutional Repositories IRs typically hold the digitized intellectual output of a university’s students and faculty – such as keystone projects for undergraduates, and masters theses and doctoral dissertations, along with research papers by faculty members As these types of materials are among the most frequently requested for interlibrary loan, creating an IR can be a cost saver as well as exposing research to a broader audience To demonstrate, let’s look at UT-Martin’s institutional repository – here’s the home page, where you can browse in several categories or search; and here’s page of search results: you can see there are master’s projects, journal articles, and even a privately published booklength manuscript Shared storage, public-university library unification, interconsortial cooperation on print holdings, mass digitization, open web document portals – those are some of the ways that collaborative collection development will be responding to the budget difficulties we will be Although technology is moving collaboration a lot further, I’d like to add one thought about a place technology doesn’t appear to be taking us Earlier this decade, librarians and scholars took the idea of collaboration beyond collection Knowlton, The Future of Collaborative Collection Development Among Research Libraries development and into collaborative creation – in the form of open access journals There has been a lot of hope that open access journals would help break the stranglehold of journal publishers But it looks like the publishers will be partners with us for a while, because open access journals have not done much to displace the more traditional titles One way of measuring a journal’s value for researchers is impact factor The impact factor is a measurement of how often researchers refer to articles published in a journal – the higher the impact factor, the more researchers are using a journal This slide shows the top 100 journals in the sciences ranked by impact factor The only open access journal in the list is in yellow Not very near the top So, it seems that researchers who want to access the most popular and relevant journals will continue to ask libraries to keep paying Lippincott Williams & Wilkins and their ilk for some time to come you learned a fraction of what I did by putting this talk together, then I’m sure it’s been worthwhile That said, I believe that collaborative collection development holds a lot of promise First of all, there is still progress to be made getting libraries to overcome those barriers of autonomy and lack of trust that are inhibiting cooperation; even if it does require forcing a particular book jobber down someone’s throat! Secondly, the library community is making a serious effort with Preserving America’s Print Resources to rationalize print collections on a large scale Third, digitization is becoming less expensive and easier all the time, and the digital bounty available for librarians and researchers is simply astounding And finally, modern social networking is making collaboration a snap So there it is: the current state and future prospects of collaborative collection development in 40 minutes We’ve covered the ways that libraries collaborate to save money, manage holdings, and ensure preservation, and talked about some of the reasons it doesn’t always go as planned We’ve talked about how budgets continue to be a problem, and how cooperative storage, national print holdings management and digitization can help, and we’ve discussed social networking as a tool to make collaboration easier It’s been a real pleasure to go over this with you today, and if