Consortia at the Crossroads: New Roles for New Times Mary A. Hollerich ILDS Conference October 3, 2015.

Consortia at the Crossroads: New Roles for New Times

Mary A. HollerichILDS ConferenceOctober 3, 2015

A bit of background

5 national libraries – LOC, NLM, NAL, NLE, NTL – but really none

50 (?) state libraries

Decentralized, federated approach to library services

Defining our terms

US Code of Federal Regulations, Title 47, § 54.500 (e)“A library consortium is any local, regional, or interstate cooperative association of libraries that provides for the systematic and effective coordination of the resources of schools, public, academic, and special libraries and information centers, for improving services to the clientele of such libraries.”

Why join a consortium?

Access to wider array of resources

Staff savings (debatable)

Cost savings and increased buying power

Enhanced service quality

Continuing education

Improved technology

Professional networking

Altruism – it’s the right thing to do

Humble Beginnings

“The perfection of work” American Library Association established 1876

ALA Cmte on Cooperation in Indexing and Cataloging

Printed catalog cards and the first union catalogs

“A great convenience”Samuel Swett Green writes a letter to the editor

Reciprocal borrowing comes to California

Library of Congress

First national ILL code

Out of the ashes…

Libraries respond to the Great Depression Proliferation of union card catalogs (1930s)

First academic library consortia are formed – CLUNY, TRLN (1931)

Post World War II - emphasis on cooperative acquisitions

Universal Serial and Book Exchange (1948)

Farmington Plan (1948)

Midwest Inter-Library Cooperative (1949)

Latin American Cooperative Acquisitions Program (1949)

Library Consortia Mature

1960s to 1980s a heyday for library consortia

Advent of multi-state, multi-type library consortia (e.g., ILLINET)

125 consortia formed 1931 to 1971 - 90% in the 1960s (source: Patrick, Ruth J. Guidelines for Library Cooperation: Development of Academic Library Consortia, 1972)

Services typically comprise cooperative cataloging, ILL, reference support, and/or brokering OCLC services)

Bibliographic utilities – OCLC, WLN, and RLIN

And then this happened…

1990s Explosion of electronic databases

Serials crisis begins to vastly erode library buying power

World Wide Web and GUI interfaces

Emphasis on service quality improvement to meet user demands

And it kept on coming…

2000s More explosion of e-content (ebooks, streaming video)

Changes in scholarly communication models

State and federal governments reduce financial support

Many consortia close or merge with others

Emphasis on assessment and demonstrating value

Increasing numbers of students can no longer afford textbooks

Disrupting resource sharing

Shared licensing of e-resources

Full-text databases

E-books

Streaming video

Audio files

Consortial DDACARLI

Orbis Cascade Alliance

ILL and e-books

Source: occamsreader.org

Collection Management

Cooperative deselection

Shared print repositories

CIC Shared Print

West Regional Storage Trust

Maine Shared Collections Cooperative

Open Educational Resources

OER Commons

Open Access Textbooks

Open Textbook Library

Software development

RapidILL

IDS ALIAS

Occam’s Reader

Digitization

HathiTrust

DPLA Minnesota Digital Library

Consortia: Looking Ahead

Digitization, digitization, and more digitization

Collection development and management – with an emphasis on the management

Consortial demand-driven acquisitions

Management of cooperative deselection projects

Network of shared print repositories

ILL of e-books – we need Occam’s Reader to succeed!

Advocacy – for OA, copyright reform

Questions?

mary.hollerich@gmail.com