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This is the last in a series of posts on the Leadership through Collaboration Forum and the thinking that went into structuring the agenda. Before I conclude, I’d like to acknowledge that creating the forum agenda was a collaborative activity in and of itself - we’re grateful in particular to our host (The Smithsonian Institution), and to all of the RLG Partners on the planning group who contributed (you’ll see them listed at the bottom of this page). Additional support for the event came from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation - thank you!

Some final words on the collaboration contexts: It is important to remember that no one of the collaboration contexts (local, group, or global) is inherently better than the other. Each provides the appropriate framing for solving different types of issues. Within any of these three contexts, the collaboration can be very shallow or very deep.

Figure 1: The Collaboration Continuum (introduced in “Beyond the Silos of the LAMs: Collaboration Among Libraries, Archives and Museums” [pdf])

Moving along the collaboration continuum, collaborations which express themselves as contact, cooperation or coordination are additive; they foster a working relationship among partners, yet remain distinct projects easily separable from the core functions and workings of the institution. Such collaborations do not impact how an institution organizes itself and its workforce. Deeper collaborations trend toward convergence, a transformative process that eventually will change behaviors, processes and organizational structures, and leads to a fundamental interconnectedness and interdependence among the partners. In transformative collaborations, participants find efficiencies that free up time and resources to focus on the things they do best. At the extreme end of the continuum, convergence in a specific area may turn into infrastructure: a service that is so deeply embedded into our everyday life that it becomes visible only when it breaks down. You only think about who hosts your e-mail, or where your electricity comes from, when the service is interrupted.

The stages of contact, cooperation and coordination on the collaboration continuum are likely the prerequisites for reaping the benefits of deep collaboration and convergence. Within each of the local, group, and global collaboration contexts, additive or transformative relationships can emerge. For both the collaboration contexts and the stages of the collaboration continuum, each setting provides unique benefits and drawbacks. Finding the appropriate collaboration context for a given challenge, and building relationships along the continuum so all parties derive the maximum benefit, are hallmarks of successful long-term collaborations.

Our last panel of speakers during “Yours, Mine, Ours: Leadership through Collaboration“ focuses on global collaborations:

In this segment of the forum, we acknowledge all of the activity which has already gone into collaborations benefiting the entire community. However, we also feel it is time to take a step back and re-assess whether our current behaviors in creating shared aggregations, standards and tools are serving us well in meeting user expectations at the network level.

Here’s the background:

Global Solutions - Common Values
“Things work at scale because the community subscribes to the same values.”

In local and group collaborations, institutions and their interests are at the forefront, and the collaborative activity is predicated on the direct local benefit reaped. A collaboration guided by common values introduces a notable paradigm shift. It does not put the institutions first, but rather focuses on the intended audience and what that audience expects us to deliver.

While any type of collaboration can be fueled by common values, including those circumscribed by institutional boundaries or specific group interests, value-based collaboration emerges as a survival strategy in the global networked environment. Ultimately, we all serve those who want access to our information, increasingly in digital form. Collaboration around values is driven by a shared vision which allows an entire community to respond to challenges in a consistent manner, and invisibly aligns all of us in an effort to realize a shared vision. In this context, the emphasis shifts from managing the collaboration to addressing the shared values. The sphere of common values collaboration includes standards, policies for copyright and data aggregation, the commons and open data movements, and the vision of Linked Data.

While common value collaborations may have the lowest direct overhead (parties do not have to remain in constant and carefully orchestrated communication to remain in sync), they may also be the most difficult to sell to parent institutions, which generally pay their employees to work on local issues. The institutional benefit of such collaborations is less tangible since they raise all ships. As a matter of fact, in some instances common value behaviors may be perceived as threatening local goals, such as policies and technical protocols for making institutional content freely and openly available in many different venues.

At its best, applying global values that make things work in a larger context in group and local settings ultimately prepares those institutions for the opportunities of the networked environment. There’s benefit in thinking globally and acting locally.

In the next (and final) post in this series on the collaboration contexts and how they’ve shaped the overall structure of the forum, we’ll revisit the popular collaboration continuum, first introduced in the Beyond the Silos of the LAMs [pdf] report.

The following panelists will help us explore the ins and outs of group collaborations during “Yours, Mine, Ours: Leadership through Collaboration“:

As with our previous panel on local solutions, the specific projects serve as exemplars for collaboration strategies which the audience will be able to apply to realizing their own ambitions. Speaking of which, we’ve made sure to have some time on the agenda where attendees can explore the implications of what they’ve heard in smaller group settings (see the Birds-of-a-Feather slots on Day 2). During online registration, people vote for specific topics they’d like to see covered in these facilitated discussion settings, such as single search (local), digital preservation (group) or open access (global).

Here’s some background on group collaborations:

Group Solutions - Common Interest
“We work together because we have common interests.”

Moving beyond the single institution, collaboration across organizational boundaries occurs when there is a common interest. A group of motivated individuals or institutions bands together to work on an issue they would have found difficult or impossible to solve in isolation. Many collaborative grant-funded projects fall into this category: a finite number of players tackle an issue that vexes participants in their own local contexts. Because the local benefit of this type of collaboration can be readily perceived, common interest collaborations are generally accepted as a way to achieve broad outcomes. In the sphere of group collaborations, we see activities such as open-source software development, subject-based data aggregations, and shared technological platforms such as HathiTrust.

On the other hand, group collaborations around a common interest have a high management overhead for setting and managing expectations, dividing up the work, coordinating outputs from different groups, and staying on track. Different work cultures among a group’s participants can pose a serious threat to the most rationally conceived projects. Furthermore, participants’ interests may evolve in different directions; commonalities may dissipate over time.

Since common interest collaborations rely on direct contact, meetings and constant negotiation, it is challenging to mount and manage them at scale. Once these collaborations mature, they often require the creation of new organizational structures such as governing boards or foundations.

In the next post in this series, we’ll look at common value collaborations as a strategy for aligning the entire community.

“Local” is the first Collaboration Context we’ll explore at “Yours, Mine, Ours: Leadership through Collaboration.” Our panelists will be:

We’ve instructed all of our speakers to spend the bulk of their time on strategies for creating and deepening collaborations, and to focus both on successes and failures. (All of the presentations in this section are hence titled “Collaboration Trials and Triumphs”.) Here’s the background:

Local Solutions - Common Administration
“We work together because we have the same employer.”

From the perspective of a large institution (e.g., a university campus) with many units (e.g., libraries, archives and museums), incorporating collaboration into the underlying work culture is foundational to realizing that institution’s potential and achieving its mission. When ideas, data and services flow freely, new solutions emerge, and new knowledge is created. From the perspective of individual units, collaboration allows them to thrive when times are good and survive when times are bad. Deep and pervasive service and data relationships with other units provide a compelling argument for continued or increased funding, whereas isolation calls into question the value provided to the institution as a whole.

In highly distributed environments, deep collaboration requires conscious effort and leadership. Since both the institution and its constituent units directly reap the benefits of local collaboration, the context of common administration offers a straightforward environment for engaging in joint work. In the sphere of local solutions, we currently see activities such as cross-collection search, shared digitization and digital asset management, and shared conservation facilities.

On the other hand, contemplating collaboration solely within the boundaries of your own institution is arbitrarily self-limiting. While there is no shortage of issues that beg to be addressed at the local level, some aspirations are simply beyond the reach of individual institutions acting alone.
Group collaborations try to address that which transcends any single institution. Don’t try it abroad if you haven’t done it at home: in many instances, collaboration at the local level is likely to be a prerequisite for entering into meaningful collaborative activities centered on common interest.

We’ll take a look at common interest collaborations in the next blog post. (Also take a peek at the initial post in this series if you haven’t already.) Stay tuned!

There is a well-known fable about blind men with contrasting views on the anatomy of an elephant, each having examined a separate piece of the beast and independently concluded that it is either very like a spear, or a fan, or a snake, etc.  Even in combination their observations fail to provide a very good picture of what an elephant looks like as a whole.  The story was popularized in a poem by John Godfrey Saxe which is cited in a surprisingly wide variety of publications, from early childhood education manuals, to scientific and medical reports, to vocational guides and, more predictably, collections of 19C verse.  I know this because a search on a distinctive phrase from the poem’s conclusion: “prate about an elephant not one of them has seen” in the HathiTrust digital library finds more than 140 matches in these places.

Blind searching in large digital text repositories like the HathiTrust or Google Books provides an intriguing but incomplete view of the mass-digitized book corpus.  Frequently cited statistics like “12 million books” in GBS, “5 million books” or “one million public domain books” in Hathi don’t really tell us much about the anatomy of the mammoth.  Pat the elephant…what do you find?  A lot of curious sensory experiences that don’t add up.

When it comes to anatomizing elephants, all parts are not created equal.  Georges Cuvier, who famously reconstructed skeletons on the basis of a tooth or a toe, knew this.  Cuvier confidently and correctly distinguished Indian and African elephant species based on characteristic differences in jawbones; he ‘discovered’ the woolly mammoth based on a close examination of incomplete fossil remains.

I’m inclined to think that counting books (or volumes) is about as useful in characterizing the mass-digitized corpus as counting vertebrae in the catacombs.  It tells us something about how much is there, but not much about who, or what, is there.

Happily, there is an abundance of bibliographic metadata describing the content from which the mass-digitized corpus was sourced that can be used (like a fossilized tooth or a toe) to assign some generic, or I suppose specific, characteristics to the elephant in the room.  Over the past year, OCLC Research has been working on a project with Hathi and some other interested libraries to begin characterizing the enormous, vaguely familiar (snake? spear? tree?) yet altogether revolutionary (woolly!) mammoth created through the digitization of legacy print collections.

We’ve posted some empirical data on the subject and library distribution of titles in the Hathi digital repository here.  

I think it provides a useful complement to the enchanting and progressively revealing fan-dance of class numbers here.

More to come.

The LAM (library, archive, museum) workshops held by OCLC Research at Princeton University, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Edinburgh, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Yale University intentionally focused on collaboration within a single institution. We expected that we would be able to find, as well as catalyze, deeper collaborations under an institutional umbrella than among institutions that don’t have an administrative structure in common. The projects the workshop sites committed themselves to (described in “Beyond the Silos of the LAMs” [pdf]) bear out this assumption.

Enter:

Yours, Mine, Ours: Leadership through Collaboration
20-21 September 2010
Smithsonian Institution, Ripley Center, Washington, D.C.
Register here.

Organized by the RLG Partnership and OCLC Research
Hosted by the Smithsonian Institution
Supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation
Endorsed by the Joint SAA, ALA and AAM Committee on Archives, Libraries & Museums (CALM)

With this forum, we are intentionally broadening the conversation. While we continue to be passionate about library, archive, and museum collaboration (see my guest blogs at the Center for the Future of Museums here and here), we’ll now place the emphasis more on “collaboration” and just a tad less on “LAM.” Good collaborations in cultural heritage don’t always require all three of these parties to be present, and they often require additional parties (such as IT or public/private partners) to succeed.

In addition, we are expanding our investigation beyond institutional boundaries to look at collaboration in the broader landscape. Collaborations can form in different settings: local (within a single institution), in a group setting, or in a seemingly unbounded environment that we’ll call “global.” These collaboration contexts provide the scaffolding for our Leadership through Collaboration forum, which features panels (take a look at the agenda) exploring each of these contexts in greater depth. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll post a series of blogs which attempt to sketch out the benefits and limitations inherent in each of these settings as a high-level guide to the trajectory of our event, as well as a resource in its own right for assessing collaborative activities. Stay tuned!

As usual, I’m a little late to the party. Glancing at the ACRL Top Ten Trends in Academic Libraries (published in the June C&CL News) I realized that these ten items relate in one way or another to work we are doing on behalf of the RLG Partnership. (I shouldn’t be too surprised that the list resonates since my colleague Lynn Silipigni Connaway is a member of the committee that put the list together). The list is in alphabetical order, rather than ranked order. I’ve abbreviated the list and included my own commentary.

1. Academic library collection growth is driven by patron demand and will include new resource types. … Increasingly, libraries are acquiring local collections and unique materials … These materials may include special collections, university archives, and/or the scholarly output of faculty and students.

Under the rubric of “Mobilizing Unique Materials,” we have a suite of projects dedicated to surfacing the rare and unique. Our flagship project in this area is the Survey on Special Collections and Archives, which will identify trends and norms, and will help set the stage for future action. Work on Sharing Special Collections, our report on Barriers to using EAD, and other projects, are also under this umbrella. We also have an upcoming symposium on the role of special collections in a digital age (October 12-13, Oxford, UK)

Libraries also recognize the need to collect, preserve, and provide access to digital datasets. …

Our data curation activity is a collaboration between RLG Partners and LIBER members, coordinated by my colleague John MacColl.

2. Budget challenges will continue and libraries will evolve as a result. …

Budget challenges (which is a nice way of putting it) are just one of a number of risk factors identified and discussed in our recent “risk report” (Research Libraries, Risk and Systematic Change [pdf])

3. Changes in higher education will require that librarians possess diverse skill sets. …

See our Research Information Management Roadmap project for our “manifesto” urging librarians to get closer to the heart of the research process.

4. Demands for accountability and assessment will increase. …

It’s clear that “business as usual” will no longer cut it. In the area of special collections, where standard measures for “counting” are not yet established, there is much room for improvement. We are encouraging more uniform ways of assessing archival collections for the purpose of prioritization for description and processing, preservation needs, collection management, selection for digitization and other collection management functions.

We also explored the role of libraries in assessment of research output in a study of in five countries more active than the US in this area.

5. Digitization of unique library collections will increase and require a larger share of resources. Digitization projects make hidden and underused special collections available to researchers worldwide.

In addition to larger efforts in regards to special collections, We have had a special focus on making special collections materials more accessible through digitization (our paper Shifting Gears is part of this effort). Additionally, we have a large working group that is both encouraging use of cameras in the reading room (patron led digitization!), and also looking at theory and practice that will help optimize digitization done to fulfill patron requests.

6. Explosive growth of mobile devices and applications will drive new services. …

My colleague Bruce Washburn, a crack developer with an interest in and affinity for mobile applications did a great webinar on mobile development. You can check this out to get a sense of the wide-ranging territory that is mobile.

7. Increased collaboration will expand the role of the library within the institution and beyond…

Which is why we are holding an important Leadership through Collaboration meeting (September 20-21, in Washington, DC). Register now!

8. Libraries will continue to lead efforts to develop scholarly communication and intellectual property services. …

Related to our efforts to encourage digitization of unpublished materials, we convened a group that helped to document “well-intentioned practices” that will help guide risk assessment (and hopefully foster a community of digitizers rather than fence sitters).

9. Technology will continue to change services and required skills. …

Our Technical Advances for Innovation in Cultural Heritage Institutions (TAI CHI) webinar series has been developed as a way to teach library staff new technology skills and educate them about new products to help increase their productivity in today’s changing library, archive and museum environment.

One of the tremendous shifts in recent years has been content becoming a hub around which “social” activities take place. There’s a lot of potential to be tapped from the crowds, in the form of commentaries, reviews, tags, translations, or links to related sources. Our wide-ranging Sharing and Aggregating Social Metadata activity has a large working group examining which areas of social metadata are likely to be wise investments for libraries, archives, and museums.

10. The definition of the library will change as physical space is repurposed and virtual space expands. …

I think that accomplishing the transformation of the library as a physical store for books (where collections and services are very tightly coupled) to an entity with services more tightly aligned with support of the research process (separate from books) will be one of the greatest challenges many of us will face over the next 3-5 years. At the heart of this challenge will be shifting the enormous legacy print collections to shared storage. My colleague Constance Malpas has been doing interesting and useful work in this area, particularly in relationship to the Cloud Library project.

If you look at the agenda for the 2010 RLG Partnership Annual Meeting and the agenda for our Partner Symposium “When the Books Leave the Building” (both of which happened last month) you will see both tight and loose connections between the ACRL list and our work agenda. This is one reason I love my job — I feel like I’m part of an organization that is working every day towards facing the challenges of our profession.

Ithaka S+R recently published its Faculty Survey 2009: Key Strategic Insights for Libraries, Publishers, and Societies. It considers the way faculty views of the library are changing, and analyses library roles into three key functions:

“The library is a starting point or ’gateway’ for locating information for my research” (which we refer to as the gateway function). “The library pays for resources I need, from academic journals to books to electronic databases” (which we refer to as the buyer function). “The library is a repository of resources – in other words, it archives, preserves, and keeps track of resources” (which we refer to as the archive function).

Ithaka’s analysis shows that the gateway function has declined (its importance rating has dropped from 70%-58%) over the six years in which the biennnial studies have been made, while the buyer function has steadily increased (81%-90%). The archive function has remained relatively static at just over 70%.

Many of the findings in this report are interesting, and relevant to us as we focus - via our Working Group on Research Services - on the specific topic of Support for Research Dissemination. We have chosen the word dissemination with some care. What we will be looking at is researcher behaviours and practices concerning institutional repositories, individual websites, subject archives, virtual research environments, blogs, blog aggregations and other social venues. In other words, every research dissemination venue except the conventional (and still overpoweringly influential) modes of scholarly publishing - the journal, the monograph and the conference paper. We will look at the way researchers use these alternative venues to disseminate their work, and the factors that account for the types and rates of dissemination. Read the rest of this entry »

As those of you who have listened to Tom Hickerson’s Distinguished Seminar Series lecture will know, the University of Calgary has embarked on an ambitious plan of integrating their libraries, archives and museums under a single administrative umbrella (Libraries & Cultural Resources or LCR). This convergence is catalyzed by a new building in the heart of the university’s campus, which will co-locate the units as well as many campus research, teaching & learning support functions. In latest news, last week a reorganization of LCR was announced to realign the staff with emerging priorities. The University of Calgary is our latest addition to the roster of institutions participating in the RLG Partnership, and to make proper mutual introductions, a team from OCLC Research visited Calgary last week.

In conversations preparing for our trip, we were asked to make a contribution in moving LAM integration at the university forward, and in particular, to focus on Calgary’s ambitions to create a single search across LCR resources. (Calgary currently experiments with Summon for single search - watch an introduction here). Our agenda (inspired by our LAM workshops) called for a broad discussion establishing key features for single search, followed by sessions focused on how archives, metadata services/libraries and museums can contribute to these features and the overarching goal of single search. You’ll find the presentation we used to set the scene for the single search discussions here - it also contains a number of examples from other institutions who have ventured down this path, including the Victoria & Albert, Yale & the Smithsonian.
Read the rest of this entry »

Other OCLC Research colleagues and I have been mentioning in recent months that we’re working toward launching a survey of special collections and archives in academic and research libraries. It seemed about time to follow up on ARL’s catalytic survey from way back in 1998. At long last (seems that way to those of us designing it), blast-off is in sight! It’ll be arriving mid-week in the e-mail box of the director of every library that belongs to the RLG Partnership in the U.S. or Canada, ARL, CARL (Canada), IRLA, and the Oberlin Group. Those of you running a special collections department or archives in one of those zones may want to be sure that it makes it to your desk soon thereafter (responses due by 18 December).

The questions cover the gamut from the routine (how much stuff do you have, how accessible is it, how many reading room visitors, etc.) to the timely (are you using the latest archival management tools and Web 2.0 social networking technologies, have you made progress on born-digital, do you have any staff or money left in this budget climate, etc.). Get ready to tell us all about your institutional selves. The project is described in detail here. Questions? Let me know.