Pulling on the red thread: Community stewardship that fuels innovation

OCLC brings libraries together. Those of us who work here think about how libraries and the people and services that make up libraries combine into networks and into communities to achieve something that’s greater than a single library.

When networks are activated through communities, we can establish a common understanding of shared challenges. And we can open generous spaces to:

  • Exchange knowledge, expertise, and resources
  • Create diverse ecosystems of ideas and relationships
  • Illuminate new ways of thinking to inform and inspire our work 

From introducing the Collaboration Continuum in the Beyond the Silos of the LAMs report in 2008 to our most recent publication, Library Collaboration as a Strategic Choice, our research has highlighted the benefits of a broad range of perspectives among collaboration partners.

The Collaboration Contiuum - from contact to cooperation to coordination to collaboration to convergence
The Collaboration Continuum. Originally published in Beyond the Silos of the LAMs: Collaboration Among Libraries, Archives and Museums

A theme—what our colleague Titia van der Werf would describe as the “red thread”—that runs through our research is that trust is a necessary ingredient for co-investment, success, and sustainability. Another finding is that the more diverse the network of partners, the richer the potential for true innovation. However, these rich and deep collaborations are rare. They can only be achieved when there is a compelling articulation of the benefit of collaboration, a clear roadmap of what is required, and a definitive casting of roles and responsibilities—all amid a backdrop of competing missions, priorities, pressures, and stakeholder demands. 

OCLC was built on the idea of collaboration at scale. For us, collaboration can take many forms—from libraries sharing best practices in the OCLC Community Center to advisory groups that inform our product development roadmaps. The OCLC Research Library Partnership is another way that OCLC supports the needs of diverse institutions. Our transnational partnership brings together a range of library types: academic and university libraries, independent research libraries, national libraries, and specialized libraries such as those connected to museums. Working in this rich space allows us to see common threads of strength and of need. The collective data we have access to through WorldCat enables us to see how collections interact as an ecosystem. Taken together, this gives us a powerful position to envision a future that’s more interconnected, more innovative, and built on trust relationships. It’s a rich, fertile field to grow new ideas and inspire creativity.

An example of this powerful combination of diverse institutions and collections is our recently completed project, Operationalizing the Art Research Collective Collection. Through the trust network of the OCLC RLP and long-term engagement at the annual ARLIS meeting, conversations uncovered needs and opportunities for art research institutions. These include a lack of space for collections, a lack of shared knowledge about collections even at peer institutions, and the challenges faced by art libraries seeking to form mutually beneficial partnerships with other types of institutions on the shared management of print collections. These conversations inspired a research project exploring opportunities for collaboration between art, academic, and independent research libraries. 

In this project, community was vital to express needs and possibilities. WorldCat data was just as essential. Because the art research collective collection is both specialized and decentralized, we can’t get a representative view of the art research scholarly record within one local collection. The full scale and scope of the collection is spread out over institutions across the globe. The project used bibliographic and holdings data to describe an art research collective collection in the United States and Canada to illustrate how collection analysis can inform partnership decisions. Resource sharing transactions analysis revealed existing collection sharing partnerships and allowed exploration for other kinds of collaboration.

We found that the art research collective collection is a networked collection, and therefore it’s a collective stewardship responsibility. Innovative, collaborative stewardship models are needed. Three important recommendations include:

  • Going beyond immediate peer communities for collaboration opportunities
  • Leveraging complementarities across institutional-based collections
  • Embracing greater openness to sharing

Operationalizing the Art Research Collective Collection is just one of many projects highlighted in the most recent OCLC Annual Report. In the report you’ll see a throughline of insights into collaboration around collections and stewardship, grounded in the celebration of a diverse ecosystem of global libraries. OCLC stewards this ecosystem through its many engagement communities, like the OCLC RLP, providing a rich knowledge space to create understanding of complex issues as well as a locus for exploring and charting a forward path.

Celebrate with us! Read more about our past year’s achievements and support of our member libraries in the OCLC Annual Report. And explore the Art Research Collective Collection project, including links to its reports, blog posts, presentations, and webinars.