Library collaboration: Three questions

OCLC Research has published a new report on library collaboration: Sustaining Art Research Collections: Case Studies in Collaboration. The report describes three examples of art libraries partnering with academic libraries, with an in-depth look at the motivations for each collaboration, how the partners benefit, what each partner contributes, and how they make the partnership work. While the insights from the report are drawn from partnerships involving art libraries, they can benefit any library considering collaboration.

OCLC has published a lot of work recently exploring the topic of library collaboration from multiple perspectives. In this post, I’d like to pose three questions about library collaboration, and address them by drawing on findings from our research in this area. My responses to the questions are in no way complete answers, but my goal is to make a case that these questions are important to think about, and that the work I reference can help you with that thinking.

Question #1: Why is collaboration important?

Collaboration always has been important to libraries. It’s a deeply rooted tradition in the library community as a way of getting things done and advancing the library mission. It is, in a manner of speaking, part of librarians’ professional DNA. But even so, several factors impacting libraries today suggest that collaboration will only grow in importance.

The first is the legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the last few years, library leaders have seen the importance of relying on and working with partners to weather unexpected challenges and even crises. OCLC’s study New Model Library: Pandemic Effects and Library Directions gathered insights from library leaders around the world about their pandemic experiences, and one clear theme was the importance of collaboration as a way to navigate the pandemic and its aftermath. 

While the pandemic was hopefully an unusual occurrence, collaboration also is helpful for dealing with less dramatic but nevertheless crucial pressures that impact the library’s ability to fulfill its mission. A good example is the OCLC Research project Operationalizing the Art Research Collective Collection, which looks at collaboration in the art library community. This work was motivated by the need to find sustainable paths – including collaboration – for art libraries in the face of budgetary crunches and pressures on space.

But collaboration is more than a crisis management strategy: it also can be efficacious in emerging areas where the library’s role, technology, and expectations are fluid and uncertain. Collaboration can help pool uncertainty, identify shared problems, and often, find shared solutions – as seen in another OCLC Research project, Library Collaboration in RDM, where a set of forthcoming case studies illustrate how collaborative partnerships were used to address capacity needs in the dynamic space of research data management.

While collaboration often is seen as a way to reduce redundancy, build scale and lower costs, it also can create value by leveraging complementarities – pooling strengths and building shared resources that are greater than the sum of the parts. This idea is illustrated by a key finding from OCLC’s research on collective collections: rareness is common. When the local collections of a group of institutions are aggregated together, each individual collection generally has some unique strength to contribute to the whole.

Finally, collaborations between institutions are important because they build relationships between people. They expand peer networks and professional relationships. They encourage knowledge sharing and build trust. Former OCLC Vice President of Membership and Research Lorcan Dempsey wrote a blog series on library consortia a few years ago, and he called this aspect of collaboration the “soft power” of library consortia. It’s a good reminder that collaboration is just as much about people as it is about institutions.

Question #2: Why is collaboration a strategic decision?

The idea of collaboration as a strategic choice comes from Lorcan Dempsey again. He makes the point that while collaboration is always hard, effective collaboration is even harder. Successful collaboration requires investment: dedicated attention, staff time and effort, funds – there is a real cost of collaborating that should not be overlooked. So choosing to collaborate requires careful consideration of the pros and cons of doing so, or as Lorcan describes it, “active, informed decision-making” about what should be done locally, and what should be done through collaborative arrangements. Or in other words, collaboration should be a strategic choice.

Making this choice is not easy, but the recent OCLC Research report Library Collaboration as a Strategic Choice: Evaluating Options for Acquiring Capacity aims to help libraries make good decisions about, choose effective forms of, and communicate decisions involving, collaboration. The report begins by offering a model of basic sourcing options open to libraries as they acquire new capacities. The model illustrates that collaboration is one choice among several legitimate sourcing options – none intrinsically better than the others – and therefore if it is selected, it should be the result of a strategic choice that evaluates the relative merits of different sourcing options.

The report offers insight and a tool to support library decision-makers as they make that strategic choice, by helping them understand the differences between sourcing options – including collaboration – and make the choice that best fits their needs and priorities. Identifying the features of a sourcing strategy that are the most important to your organization, picking the strategy that best represents these features, and then managing the trade-offs that inevitably follow, is a big part of treating the decision whether to collaborate as a strategic choice. With this in mind, the report supplies a checklist of considerations with which to characterize different sourcing strategies and evaluate their alignment with institutional priorities. The checklist can help clarify choices as part of the process of choosing between alternative sourcing options, including collaboration.

If collaboration is chosen, it should be managed strategically to maximize its chances for success and sustainability. To aid in this, a rich resource of economic insight on collaboration exists that can be readily applied to the library context. The report highlights four economic concepts and explores how they deepen our understanding of factors that drive successful, sustainable collaborations. Insights from these concepts are translated into a tool that can help elucidate the features of a new or existing collaboration, identify potential obstacles to success, and hopefully, craft solutions for overcoming or at least mitigating them.

Question #3: How can data support decision-making about collaboration?

The preceding question was about evaluating collaborative opportunities. But how are these opportunities discovered in the first place? A recent OCLC Research report, Sustaining Art Research Collections: Using Data to Explore Collaboration, focuses on identifying collaborative opportunities using a data-driven approach. The context is the art library community, where the effects of the pandemic and other trends are creating challenges to institutional sustainability. Art libraries have recognized that one pathway through these challenges is collaboration. The report illustrates how data about collections and resource sharing patterns can suggest collaborative opportunities of mutual benefit to art libraries and their partners.

The report begins by using WorldCat bibliographic and holdings data to construct the collective collection of 85 North American art libraries – a proxy art research collective collection used to roughly approximate the broader art research collective collection across the US and Canada. Analysis of the materials in this collective collection shapes a view of the general features of art library holdings, and from that, a basis for thinking about ways that art libraries could partner with peers or other types of institutions to support collection stewardship.

The collective collection analysis leads to insights on collaborative opportunities with potential benefits such as reducing print management costs and easing space pressures, extending the geographic and linguistic diversity of materials available to local users, and broadening access to the unique collecting strengths of local collections. The key message is that the features of the collective collection of a group of institutions often shape the opportunities for collaboration within that group; collective collection analysis is therefore a good starting point for strategic planning.

Analysis of resource sharing transactions data from the institutions in our proxy collective collection also yielded insights on discovering collaborative opportunities. For example, most transactions involved materials that the borrower did not already own, suggesting that resource sharing is done mainly to extend the boundaries of the local collection, rather than manage demand for copies of popular items. The takeaway? Differences are important: look to partner with those with different collecting priorities and strengths than your own.

Our analysis of collections and resource sharing data suggests several themes that, taken together, constitute a framework for thinking about collaborative opportunities for collection stewardship and sharing; these are documented in the report. Overall, the findings of this report illustrate how data-driven approaches for identifying collaborative opportunities can uncover synergies that offer the greatest potential benefit and help bring institutions together into valuable partnerships.

Turning opportunity into reality

All of this brings us back to where we started: the publication of OCLC Research’s latest report: Sustaining Art Research Collections: Case Studies in Collaboration. The three questions discussed above address why collaboration is important; why it should be a strategic decision; and how data-driven analytics can help identify collaborative opportunities. Our latest work offers a fourth perspective on library collaboration: how it works in practice, in the form of some fascinating case studies of collaboration in action.

The case studies are a rich source of practical experiences, lessons learned, and sage advice on making library collaborations work. And in a sense, they run orthogonally to the concepts and ideas discussed in this post, as real-world examples of embracing the importance of collaboration as a pathway through some challenge or need; making the decision to collaborate; and transforming collaborative opportunities into successful partnerships.

Sustaining Art Research Collections: Case Studies in Collaboration focuses on examples of art libraries forming partnerships with academic libraries. Another report, to be released later this year, will provide another set of case studies, this time featuring examples of academic libraries partnering together to create research data management capacity. We apply the insights from Library Collaboration as a Strategic Choice to the case studies and see how they play out in practice. Stay tuned for more information on this forthcoming report!

OCLC Research’s work in the area of library collaboration combines the conceptual with the practical, in an effort to assemble resources to help libraries think about and act on the questions in this post. The more we understand collaboration’s importance, the strategic nature of the decision to collaborate, and the value of data-driven analysis to identify collaborative opportunities, the better positioned we are to use collaboration effectively.

This post was adapted from recent talks given at the 2023 ACRL conference and to the OCLC Global Council. Thanks to my colleagues Merrilee Proffitt, Peter Collins, Cathy King, Richard Urban, and Lynn Connaway for shaping the ideas in this post.