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Having shared a single library system since 1991, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore (the Tri- College Library Consortium) now boast an ambitious program to slash title duplication by agreeing to build strengths in different areas of the collection. The four institutions that make up CONSORT, which are also part of the Five Colleges of Ohio and tied to OhioLINK, ask faculty to specify whether a title is needed locally before purchasing. Within the 181-member Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI), libraries can band together and receive grants to divvy up collection development responsibilities in areas that need revitalizing. And though the 33 members of the Orbis Cascade Alliance aren't yet ready for that degree of sharing, spread as they are over Washington and Oregon, they do license databases collectively, avoid duplication by checking both the shared online catalog and vendor orders before purchasing, and trade 305,000 items yearly through interlibrary loan (ILL).

Of course, public libraries from Wasington to Florida have long cooperated to license databases, whether by state or by region, and many share online catalogs as well. Now there's more afoot. The Oregon Digital Library Consortium, brainchild of eight public libraries, provides downloadable audiobooks for patrons' PCs or MP3s 'round the clock. In Massachusetts, the Merrimack Valley Library Consortium offers downloadable video as well as audio and routinely hustles popular DVDs among its 34 members. “Not consortial in dollars but in spirit,” explains Elissa Miller, collection development librarian, Arlington Public Library, VA, the Metropolitan Area Collection Development Consortium meets quarterly to compare notes, though groups within the group have jointly purchased ebooks and other nonprint formats.

Like these institutions, most public libraries have confined their collaborative efforts to nonprint media. But a few are trying out the academic model. Seattle Public Library, for instance, is contemplating a venture with neighboring libraries to select, acquire, and catalog world literature titles together—a great example of how tools being developed in academia can be adapted to public library use. Indeed, as the number of formats and the cost of obtaining them rocket upward, librarians everywhere must find ways to adapt, and collaborative collection development could be the answer. It's an old idea writ new, assuring a larger and more diverse collection for less expense, and variations can be based on the needs of the institutions involved. “The models will multiply according to local circumstances,” observes Robert Kieft, director of the Haverford College Libraries and an advocate of this approach. “But with our capacity to share information about collections and to share the collections themselves, I think we will see a major shift in the way libraries collect, and that will be in the direction of cooperation.”

The American Library Association (ALA) would seem to agree, having just initiated a Cooperative Collection Development Committee. So freshly minted that it first met at the ALA Midwinter Meeting this January, the committee reports jointly to RUSA CODES and RUSA STARS and is already planning a panel for the ALA summer conference in 2007. Led by cochairs James Buckett, head, collections, access, and technical services, Steenbock Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Michael Levine-Clark, collections librarian, Penrose Library, University of Denver, the committee is expected to explore how consortia can streamline operations through joint efforts in storage, electronic purchases, and the building of print collections.

Buying print together

Resource sharing may be heating up, but it's in fact “a cornerstone of U.S. librarianship,” asserts Kieft, “going all the way back to Melvil Dewey.” By the Roaring Twenties, rust-belt librarians were discussing the exchange of important scientific documents—by plane, no less—and thereafter various efforts to share collection building were instituted at academic libraries nationwide. When these efforts were successful, they often occurred in the outlying reaches of the collection embracing, say, Maltese literature (“you do ancient, and I'll do modern”) or government documents on Mexico.

Unfortunately, as Kieft observes, cooperation has often been waylaid by a countervailing tendency in the library world: “We're proud of our collections, we don't want anyone to mess with our decisions and our traditions, and we want to be first, all of which militates against the fundamental cooperative instinct.” At public libraries, often branches within a system or systems within a larger county or regional unit, some degree of cooperation is guaranteed, though most public librarians have a lot of trouble imagining other systems shopping around for their books. The situation may be even trickier at academic libraries, despite a history of collaboration; self-sufficiency has long been the password in the academic realm, with librarians longing for collections that are bigger and better than anything else out there and possessed of a distinctive profile that will draw in both students and research-minded faculty—and Association of Research Libraries ranking that is based, in part, on the size of a library's collection. So why is the cooperative instinct starting to win out?

Technology leads the way

In the last decades, technology has made stepped-up cooperation both possible and necessary. Many libraries were brought closer together when librarians found they could save money by jointly licensing databases. At the same time, consortial licensing allowed academic libraries in particular to secure costly but important journals at a good price. Comfortable with consortial purchasing and happily adjusting to speed-of-light document delivery that made diverse institutions seem like one, academic librarians easily bought the concept of the shared online catalog, essential to the long-term success of collaborative collection development. (The shared online catalog is also common in public libraries, of course, but their story diverges somewhat.)

Soon, gaps and, more significantly, frustrating duplications in these shared systems became apparent. With the number of titles published each year rising rapidly, budgets crawling upward at a slower rate, and libraries so tight for space that shared storage had already become a watchword of interlibrary cooperation, many academic libraries in consortial relationships decided that they could ill afford multiple copies of certain titles, whether core or curiosity. It was one quick step to some sort of collaborative effort at building print collections, sometimes by thinking twice before purchasing something already in the system and sometimes by making tight calls on who would buy what.

And why not? These days, no library can hope to own everything, and collaborative collection development allows for a richer, more diverse collection while saving space and money. As Margo Warner Curl, project coordinator, CONSORT, College of Wooster, notes dryly, “One advantage of collaboration is that we can put off building a new library.” Librarians can also show their institution's anxious provost that they are getting thousands of dollars worth of material they wouldn't have were they not part of the consortium, justifying membership fees, and the consortial connection becomes an important part of the library's profile.

In addition, cultural change has made the allocation of different subcollections to different campuses much more feasible; online catalogs no longer intimidate, and searching shared online catalogs has advantages over browsing the stacks. A title always shows up, related titles come to light that might otherwise be missed (a women's studies search could wind through history, literature, and sociology), and useful features like tables of contents are often available. Kieft presents all these arguments to professors who claim they can't kick the stacks habit, gently pointing out that they're perfectly happy to browse Amazon. “People are becoming much more accustomed to doing life business online,” he concludes, “and at some point that general cultural influence will encourage [collaborative collection building as] a delivery model. The whole idea of what a collection is has begun changing in the world of Google.”

Variations on a theme

Collaborative collection development plays out differently in different libraries. Clearly, libraries that are similar in student body and geographically close, like the Tri-College Consortium and the Five Colleges of Massachusetts (Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and University of Massachusetts, Amherst), will find it easier to make decisions meeting everyone's needs than heterogeneous consortia from CARLI to California's and New York's state systems. It also helps when libraries have had a long history of mutual effort on various projects. Having shared an approval plan for 30 years, Tri-Co's Bryn Mawr and Haverford are slipping easily into a more active collaboration; integrating Swarthmore into the proceedings has been somewhat bumpy, but again it helps that the three colleges opted to purchase a single library system two decades ago. Currently, Tri-Co is tackling select aspects of literature, film, and political science, divvying up collection responsibilities for the first two by publisher and the latter by subject.

CONSORT, whose members include the College of Wooster, Denison University, Kenyon College, and Ohio Wesleyan University, has dipped into collaborative collection development in three small areas—Asian studies, exhibition catalogs, and play scripts. These were areas that its vendor, Yankee Book Peddler (YPB), suggested showed some weakness. (YPB is not only able to give consortium members real-time figures revealing what other members have ordered, helping them to avoid unwanted duplication, but it can also run reports showing areas where the consortium's coverage is scanty or its duplication high.) Still struggling with this project and another on religion it can't quite launch, CONSORT is focusing instead on reducing duplication. Anyone placing an order must rank a title as needed locally, needed somewhere in the system, or needed (as one of several copies) in OhioLINK. Of course, such ratings are open to dispute, and different libraries may ultimately have different ideas about what's important. Nevertheless, says Wooster's Curl, “We are at the very beginning of a journey.”

CARLI is much further along the road, as its members have shouldered joint collection responsibilities in some form for 25 years. The result of a recent merger by three consortia (ICCMP, IDAL, and ILCSO) and still feeling some growing pains as a result, CARLI's 181 members range from the University of Chicago to Trinity Christian College, with 65 members sharing an online catalog. As noted by CARLI chair Mary Munroe (associate dean, collections and technical services, Founders Memorial Library, Northern Illinois University), “We have a much different way of doing things than Bob [Kieft] because Illinois is a much bigger state, and we can't have true cooperative collection development.” CARLI thinks of cooperative collection development as “go[ing] beyond the acquisition of materials to include an overarching view, including last-copy responsibilities,” says its director, Elizabeth Clarage. Most significant, it makes yearly grants to groups of libraries that propose to split up responsibilities for an undernourished area in state or regional coverage.

Focused proposals

The areas are usually fairly specific subsections of a larger part of the main collection. “Say a group decides we have a deficit in international business,” explains Munroe. “Someone will take Asia, another Africa, and another Europe. Each library makes a commitment to maintain the collection it had agreed to purchase in the first year, and all the books become part of the overall catalog.” Some 25 to 30 proposals are offered up yearly, with only a few accepted; hard figures are required to prove that a proposal is truly worthy. Proposals over the years that have worked out particularly well, says Munroe, covered molecular biology, South Asia studies, the African diaspora, and Holocaust studies, the latter focusing on video materials.

Over on the West Coast, the folks at Orbis Cascade take a different view. “Philosophically, we are not pursuing a top-down organization, saying 'I will collect in this and you in that,' ” explains John Helmer, the consortium's executive director. “Instead, we take a grass-roots approach, giving people the tools to make decisions.” These tools include joint ordering, intensive ILL, and an assessment of the overall collection for strengths and weaknesses, correlations among subcollections, and the inevitable duplication. Orbis librarians can avoid duplication by checking whether other members own or have ordered a title before purchasing. But, as with other consortia, checking is not mandatory, and Helmer argues that libraries may have perfectly good reasons for purchasing a duplicate anyway. “The real question is how valuable is uniqueness and how valuable is duplication—and how much duplication,” he says, and that's not so easy to determine.

The consortium is also tracking ILL patterns for articles, hoping to save money by replacing it with electronic delivery. It can never completely replace its robust courier service, however, which embraces both public libraries and other institutions that can benefit from speedy delivery over the mountains. Orbis is glad to be a good neighbor by including them in the daily shuttles, and, in any case, nonmembers are charged for the service, which helps the bottom line. Consortia do get grants—Tri-Co's experiments are funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for instance—but most secure funding by charging members a fee or asking them to contribute a percentage of their materials budget. Unlike some consortia, however, Orbis gets no state funding.

Some challenges

Now Orbis is investigating cooperative journal archiving and a Regional Library Services Center that would afford high-density storage along the lines of the Harvard Depository. But it is moving carefully, because if collaborative collection development has its benefits, it also inevitably poses some problems. Libraries have different budgets, different missions, and different ways of doing things, and getting an institution to change its culture can be just as hard as getting it to surrender some autonomy. Making faculty members change their behavior is hard, too. Most, particularly humanities professors without fancy labs to brag about, place special pride in the library and resist what they see as interference.

In addition, making sure that other consortium members are keeping their end of the bargain takes trust. Librarians who have worked together for years have built good relations and can also recognize the quirks or shortcomings of certain selectors, but new members may not be so lucky. Finally, there's what Kieft calls the “After you, Alphonse” dilemma, which arises when certain libraries sit back and let others do all the purchasing, assured that the requisite titles will be somewhere in the system. Such inactivity can badly unbalance the overall collection, and consortia like Orbis have constantly recalibrated formulas to assure that every member is doing its fair share of lending and borrowing.

Despite these drawbacks, academic libraries engaged in collaborative collection development generally see it as the way to go. Could it work for public libraries as well? Some academic librarians say yes, provided that collaboration does not take the place of local support. Public librarians aren't so sure, particularly when collaboration means dividing responsibilities with other systems. Granted, these librarians are eagerly making joint electronic purchases, but even that can pose problems. Of Merrimack Valley's shared DVD collection, Executive Director Lawrence Rungren notes that “owning libraries are unhappy because DVDs are going around the network; other libraries are creating browsing collections that aren't available to fill requests, which angers those that don't restrict their DVDs.”

As Cynthia Orr, collection manager, Cleveland Public Library, argues, “Patrons expect full service at local libraries. What if my specialty is fine arts, and another library doesn't buy a fine arts book it really should?” Many public librarians concur. “[Our patrons] are busy, active people who want what they want now or maybe yesterday,” says New Canaan Public Library assistant director Cynde Lahey. “And they want it in their own library.” New Canaan director David Bryant doesn't see collaboration in its immediate future, as “an amazing number of titles are not held in common, which seems to me emblematic of a fiercely independent group of libraries (and librarians) who listen to their readers.”

New thinking

Still, New Canaan's librarians acknowledge that they benefit from shared statewide resources like IConn, and they do use ReQuest to determine whether nearby libraries own something on their wish list. In addition, their library boasts special strengths in arts and humanities and leaves heavy-duty business purchases to their colleagues in Stamford. Libraries do play to their particular strengths, and perhaps someday Connecticut-area librarians can find a way to formalize these differences and benefit from one another's expertise. Muses Karl Helicher, director, Upper Merion Township Library, King of Prussia, PA, “With ILL skyrocketing, the potential exists for some type of cooperative buying. But each public library will still need to buy best sellers and current works to serve their geographic clientele.”

For many public libraries, adopting the collaborative collection development model would require a new way of thinking. As Kieft notes, in this model, libraries are equal partners “in which each library recognizes that it is a node in the network and that if it doesn't do its work, the whole system will fail.” Imagine those strings of Christmas tree lights that all blink off when one bulb blows. But public libraries have moved toward centralized collection development, and LJ's 2006 book-buying survey revealed that a significant number are willing to surrender some selection duties to vendors. Phoenix Public Library has gone whole hog and announced that it will give its vendor a blank check for a chunk of its collection.

Does this spell doom for collaborative collection development in public libraries? Not necessarily. Some toughly independent academic libraries have learned to work together and love it. A few academic consortia have let public libraries into their midst, gaining access to popular collections even as public library patrons gain access to research-level materials. Public libraries already have significant tools in place to allow collaboration, though they may well take a different direction from their academic brethren. But that's the beauty of this model. Collaborative collection development can take any number of forms, and librarians can make it work for them. In the long run, everybody wins.