Consortia at the Crossroads: New Roles for New Times Mary A. Hollerich ILDS Conference October 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, § (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 % 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 DDA CARLI 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?