Joint-Use Libraries Get Analysis and Encouragement

By Bruce E. Massis, Columbus State Community College, OH -- Library Journal, 9/1/2007

Joint-use libraries—serving two or more distinct user groups and governed cooperatively—are growing in popularity internationally, and practitioners, researchers, and policymakers gathered in June to discuss the phenomenon. Joint-use Libraries, an international conference, sponsored by the University of Central England (UCE), Birmingham, and held in Manchester, UK, drew more than 100 participants from 11 countries, with about half the attendees from Britain.

The joint-use library, participants said, offers significant benefits, including shared resources, greater accessibility to collections and technology, the opportunity to reach new users, and the possibility of collaboration on new and varied services. The library, more than any other direct service, is a bridge between the student and faculty population and the public, as well as the traditional center of a campus or community.

Indeed, the public library/university combination is the most prevalent type. Anne Hannaford, director of Information and Learning Services, University of Worcester, UK, which partners with a local public library, observed in a paper presented at the conference, “Public and academic libraries can share a single vision and serve a common community...bringing together the thinking and ideas from the county council, city council, university, and regional development agency.”

Despite the disparate countries and varieties of joint-use facilities, involving schools, public libraries, hospitals, and various higher education institutions, the issues remain similar. And the challenges can be solved, participants agreed, by librarians’ willingness to embrace collaboration and cooperation.

The top challenges involve funding, staffing, and assessment. The planning committee for a joint library must be creative in seeking support from government entities, the state, legislative bodies, the public, private and public donors, and beyond. Planners must assess which funds are short term and which are sustainable and can be used to support “extras” like staffing and computers.

Staffing issues were delineated by conference presenter Harriett MacDougall, director of the Alvin Sherman Library, Research, and Information Technology Center (right, top & bottom), shared by Nova Southeastern University and Broward County Library, Fort Lauderdale, FL. Recruiting staff with knowledge and experience of a joint-use library is difficult because there are relatively few such facilities, so training library workers to prepare for user groups (researchers, the general public) that may be new to them is critical.

There are multiple models for staff management, including a dual structure wherein each of the partners manages its own staff or a single-line management of all staff under a single entity. Beyond that, there are issues of unionization, salary levels, job titles, and hours to resolve.

Benchmarking poses concerns, especially if the joint-use library comprises a public library and an academic one, which share different assessment measures. Common measures must be developed and agreed upon by the partners, so the value of the library can be justified to funders.

Among other issues: merging integrated library systems, setting priorities for technical services and collection development, instituting a single library card or multiple varieties, deciding who negotiates database licenses and sets access, and establishing a shared mission and vision.

Australia, which now has 120 joint-use libraries (up from 21 in 1978), apparently leads the world, mainly because rural, school-based public libraries are an appropriate response to the country’s topography.

Presenter Alan Bundy of Auslib Library Consulting, Blackwood, South Australia, suggested in a conference paper that most public library buildings internationally will have “some measure of community 'jointness’ about them, either as key retail anchors in shopping centers, or collocated with facilities such as learning, cultural, community, health, tourist information, and council customer service centers.”

Other countries cited include the UK, Sweden, Portugal, New Zealand, and Canada. In the United States, besides the Florida example, joint use is featured at the San Jose State University/San Jose PL, Metropolitan State University/Dayton’s Bluff branch of the Saint Paul PL System (top left), and Daytona Beach Community College/University of Central Florida, among other facilities.

A volume of the proceedings of this conference will be published in September by AusLib Press. Copies of the proceedings will be sent to UNESCO and other intergovernmental educational, informational, and cultural agencies. An extensive bibliography on joint-use libraries is available here.