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Opportunities for Collaboration for Academic Libraries |
Thank you, Dr. Tice. And thank you to our conference organizers, who have done an exemplary job in putting together a wonderful opportunity for all of us to learn from one another.
I would like to talk to you today about collaboration. It is, of course, as old as humanity. It started when one person exchanged something of value with another person. People traded food or beads, but they also traded skills and knowledge.
Collaboration is, in fact, the engine of human progress. No one person has the time, the skills, the materials, the knowledge and the ideas to create everything needed to survive, much less thrive. Yet every person has something to contribute.
We see a dramatic example here at this conference. Each individual brings a unique set of experiences and learning to the table, resulting in an entire body of knowledge that is far more meaningful that the sum of its parts.
Today, I would like to explore some ways that academic librarians can harness the power of collaboration to get whatever they require to serve their students and faculty and gain the new skills and knowledge to do their job.
Let us start by asking: What does it mean to collaborate?
The dictionary says it means "to work together, especially on a joint intellectual effort." The potential types of collaboration in the context of academic libraries are almost endless, but I will discuss some broad areas today:
- Collaborations among the librarians, students and faculty of a university.
- Collaborations involving multiple universities, or among libraries of all kinds in a geographic region.
- Collaborations among libraries of all kinds focused on a subject or discipline.
- And finally, the most productive of all--collaborations among librarians themselves to solve problems and share skills and knowledge.
But first, let us look at four of the principles and dynamics involved in the most effective collaborations.
First, collaboration is a two-way street. Each party involved has something to give and something to get. Keep in mind, however, that contributions do not have to be of the same kind or the same quantity. Your offering may be as simple as a well defined problem that others can work with you to solve.
This works because the collaborative approach focuses on details. Most challenges can be broken down into small parts, and each part can be addressed by those who are most qualified to tackle them.
Second, the culture of collaboration is nonhierarchical. Collaborations are essentially creative; while there may be organizers, there is no chain of command. The role of the leader is simply to connect people to each other and help break the problem into a series of clear, simple parts. To quote an article from the Harvard Business Review , members "are not corseted by specific, predefined roles and responsibilities."
Why is this so important? Because successful collaborations draw assets from unexpected places. Each institution and individual has knowledge, skills and talents that fall well outside their mission and role. Each also has access to expertise. Academic librarians have a university full of experts in all kinds of disciplines, and any these may be critical to solving the problem at hand.
Third, collaborations are intensely communicative and inclusive. Remember, we are looking for knowledge in unexpected places, so we cannot make assumptions about who is best qualified to help. Use the simplest communications technologies to which everyone has access, whether that is e-mail, listservs, wikis or even paper.
Fourth, collaborations are built upon trust, respect and praise. You must trust that you will eventually get at least as much as you give, respect the contributions of others, and give praise generously. Collaboration can be an intensely rewarding and motivating, both for the individual and the institution.
Clearly, the culture of collaboration is different than the workplace culture most of us are accustomed to. It is a stretch, even a leap, for many. However, the rewards can be great, especially for institutions that find themselves short on funding and expertise.
In preparing these remarks, I asked members of SLA's new Academic Division--which came into being just this year--as well as other SLA members to give me examples of meaningful collaborations to share with you. I was very pleased that the first and most important collaboration each cited was their SLA membership. One story made the point better than I could make it myself.
A librarian for an architecture firm is routinely asked to research the physical requirements of different kinds of institutions for which her firm is planning work. She has found that the most efficient way to begin her research is to call upon members of SLA who work for the type of institution in question.
If her firm is planning work for a law office, she knows that members of the Legal Division are sure to offer guidance. Our Pharmaceutical and Health Technologies Division members have been able to point her to the best sources of information about various kinds of health-related facilities.
This is collaboration at its most basic level. By simply providing our librarian with a starting point for her research, other SLA members are saving her time, and that saves her firm money. In just minutes, using information that is readily available to them, these SLA members have helped a colleague.
What is their reward? They have heightened their reputation within their profession by demonstrating their expertise and their willingness to collaborate. Everybody wins in this kind of scenario.
Simple collaborations can occur in many contexts--for example, they can take place between academic libraries and corporations.
Lexmark is a company that develops and makes imaging devices such as laser printers, and libraries are major customers. When Lexmark needed the services of a corporate librarian, they could have hired one in the usual way. Instead, they went to the University of Kentucky libraries.
For a fee, the university supplies Lexmark with the services of a librarian who has access to the university's collection. The university, in turn, has access to Lexmark's collection, plus an added revenue stream.
This is a model that could be copied almost anywhere. Remember that the corporations that hire your university's graduates have a vested interest in the success of your educational program. They want the people who come to work for them to have the best possible skills and knowledge. That means that they may be receptive to some form of collaboration with your library that gives students and faculty access to their resources, their expertise, or their specialized collections.
The corporations that hire your graduates may also be willing to serve on a committee to advise your library on new trends in their disciplines and discuss the implications for your library's collection. The Olin College of Engineering created one--an External Library Advisory Board. One of the participating corporations decided to donate its entire collection to the university's library in return for library access for its professional staff.
Another model that almost any library can adopt is being used by a consortium of three university libraries that are located some distance from each other. A truck drove once a day from campus to campus to deliver books in their shared collection, but the cost of kept getting higher. So they approached an overnight shipping company to discuss how they might work together to solve the problem. The company offered to handle the shipping at a greatly reduced rate in exchange for occasional use of library training facilities.
So far we have talked about fairly simple collaborations. Now I want to tell you about something a bit broader, and that is the idea of regional library collaborations.
You may be familiar with Copac. It provides free access to the merged online catalogs of major UK and Irish academic research libraries, plus the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, and the National Art Library. It also includes details of special collections from a range of other libraries.
The M25 Consortium--named for the highway that circles the Greater London area, has 58 member institutions with more than 160 libraries, from large universities like the University of London Colleges to specialist collections like those of the V&A and the Museum of Natural History. Users can cross-search more than 40 catalogs. Equally important, the members of the consortium have access to high-quality training and development at an affordable price. They also have formed working groups to address common problems like disaster planning and access for people with disabilities and special needs.
SWON Libraries consists of academic, public, school and special libraries in Southwest Ohio and Northern Kentucky. This is not an inter-library loan program; it is an open-ended relationship between 27 academic libraries, 21 public libraries, 21 school libraries, and 15 special libraries of all sizes. The libraries are located in a fairly small geographic region, and they actively work together to combine energy and ideas in a way that improves all of them.
The libraries pool their resources to provide technology consultation and training. Members can reserve SWON's training facility, which is equipped with the newest high-tech learning equipment--facilities that few of the libraries could afford on their own.
SWON has also purchased quantities of laptops that member libraries can borrow for on-site training or special projects. SWON can even host member libraries' Web sites.
Most of these services would be out of the reach of SWON's members individually. But by coming together, they can share expertise, equipment and more. SWON has also built partnerships that offer its members a wide variety of training opportunities free or at greatly discounted rates.
This kind of regional library cooperative is a model popping up all over the map. If your library is not involved in one, maybe you are just the person to spearhead the effort. Think of all the resources that sharing could make possible.
Resources are, of course, the point. All over the world, we are getting better and better at sharing information electronically, and I know that your academic libraries are involved in any number of consortia that virtually expand your collections immensely. I am certain that you are all quite familiar with the Delhi University Library System, the organizer of this conference.
One of our SLA members, Dee Magnoni of Olin College of Engineering, spent last summer traveling around the U.S. to learn about the different models of academic library consortia. What is most impressive about her findings is the vast number of different approaches these libraries take.
Five academic institutions in one part of the U.S. state of Massachusetts have a longstanding consortium. They range in size from the main campus of the state university, with 26,000 students, to two private colleges that each has only about 1,500 students. The libraries of all five schools share a catalog and database. Students at any school can check books out from any other. They even share some employees. It took some hard work, but they came up with a cost-sharing formula based on their relative sizes.
Another consortium is made up of three very small private colleges near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania . Unlike the Massachusetts consortium, these colleges are quite similar in size and history, and they have similarly high admissions requirements and academic emphasis. They do not formally share employees, but their employees actively share information with one another and work together on professional development opportunities. Collaboration is particularly active among their science librarians, who work together to overcome the challenges of providing current and costly scientific and technical information in a small academic setting.
Still another consortium of three small private colleges, this one in the U.S. state of Maine, where I grew up, takes yet another approach . They share all books and have a single, joint collection plan. Responsibility for receivership rotates between the three. The libraries also share employees and have joint professional development activities.
Our member found some academic libraries involved in more radical models of collaboration.
The Claremont Colleges are a cluster of seven independent colleges in Southern California. They have long shared many services, but until recently they had separate libraries. Recently, however, they merged all of their libraries into one physical space, with one central archive.
But the most extreme example she found was the Atlanta University Center Consortium. Like the Claremont Colleges, the four colleges and universities in this group have worked together for many years. But in recent years, they have combined their libraries to create their own corporation, with its own chief executive officer.
All of the consortia I have spoken about so far involve whole institutions. Collaborations, however, can also focus on sharing particular kinds of information. This form of collaboration is not new, but I would like to discuss some noteworthy examples.
You may have heard that the U.S. is currently working on ways to reduce the ever-rising cost of health care. There is, in fact, a great political debate on the best ways to do that. However, many small initiatives have sprung up, and academic libraries are getting involved.
One is the Florida Consumer Health Information Network. Libraries are taking the lead in compiling comparative data on hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, health plans and retail prices of commonly prescribed drugs that consumers can use to make intelligent decisions about their health care.
NOAH--an acronym for New York Online Access to Health--is a collaborative effort of academic, public, and medical society libraries to provide bilingual--English and Spanish--health information to consumers.
Another interesting collaboration is called the Central Florida Memory. This began with a partnership between a university library, a public library system, and a local history center, but it has expanded. Their goal was to preserve archival content about a specific geographic area and make it accessible to teachers, researchers, academics, genealogists, and others. They have created a digital archive where small groups that do not have the means to create their own online digital collection can share historic photographs and images of documents. Through these efforts, they are saving the history of an area that has undergone a great amount of development in recent years and made it easily available to anyone interested.
These kinds of efforts do much more than compile information and make it available. They create professional networks that librarians can use to share their knowledge and expertise.
I hope that I have given each of you an idea or two for collaborative models you can use to bring more resources into your library. But I would like to conclude with a little more information about what I view as the most powerful kind of collaboration, and that is the professional association.
And by way of illustration, I would like to tell you about some of the ways that librarians and information professional work together within SLA for everyone's benefit.
- I will begin with governance. SLA is governed by an elected board of directors--volunteers chosen by their peers who give their time to work together for the future of the information profession. Our geographically-based chapters and our subject-based divisions also are governed by elected boards.
- To help these elected officers develop the skills they need to be effective, SLA has an annual Leadership Summit, where seasoned members share their knowledge with new leaders.
- Our professional development opportunities are also member-driven. All of the educational content at our major annual conference is planned and executed by members, for members. Every one of our SLA divisions has a committee of members who volunteer their time to collaborate in the planning of our conference sessions.
- Most of the instructors in our formal professional development courses are SLA members.
- Members also share their expertise in our online Innovation Lab, through wikis, and even in Second Life. And, of course, they communicate constantly through a wealth of additional online platforms.
- Last, but not least, Information Outlook, our magazine, is written primarily by SLA members for SLA members. We recently formed an advisory council of members who are helping us spot emerging trends in the information industry and locate the professionals most qualified to write about them for our members. It surprises most people to learn that, in fact, nearly everything that SLA does is really a collaboration among its members. We have a very small professional staff--less than one staff member for every 500 SLA members. When members decide they need something, they create it.
A few years ago, when members wanted to try out the new Web 2.0 tools, they did just that, creating a program called 23 Things within our Innovation Lab. With 11,000 members, we are usually able to locate all the expertise we need within our own member base.
I invite you to explore SLA's Web site. You never know what new collaborations our members will devise that can benefit you and your library!
In my opinion, librarians have a greater capacity for collaboration than any other profession, for one simple reason. You know where to find information . . . and you know how to build on it to create knowledge.
I urge you to go beyond conventional boundaries . . . to explore new ways to get what you need for your libraries through creative collaborations. Start by attacking small problems and move forward from there.
Thank you for inviting me to join you today. I wish you great success--and happy collaborations. Thank you.
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