In an era of shrinking library budgets, innovative consortial relationships are proving essential for maintaining equitable access to resources. Library leaders share how ILS-agnostic consortial borrowing, strategic partnerships beyond traditional resource sharing, and communicating value to stakeholders can multiply a library's impact despite financial constraints.

Recently, we convened a panel of library leaders to share ideas about how to deal with tightening budgets without impacting the library’s mission to offer access to resources to all who need them. Amy Pawlowski, Executive Director of the OhioLINK academic library consortium, confirmed that the challenge is real for all their members. “Pretty much everyone has either a flat budget or taken cuts,” she reports. “There’s less money for staff, less money for content. We’re really focused on how we can maintain a high level of service and maintain a certain level of access to content.”

Consortial borrowing: breaking the bonds of the ILS

While Pawlowski has a unique viewpoint as the head of a consortium, we learned that all of the panelists see consortial relationships as a key strategy. Director Migell Acosta reports that the San Diego County Library is part of San Diego Circuit, a consortium that includes both public and academic libraries in the San Diego area, which breaks with historical precedent. “So many of the consortia we belong to were born of the fact that the members were all using the same ILS,” he states. “But in our consortium, the public libraries use the same core ILS, while the academic libraries are congregating to one or two other products. In the industry, we’re seeing an overall separation of products that specialize for either academic libraries or public libraries. So the challenge is to find a software solution that is less concerned with the underlying ILS, and one that can provide a universal borrowing and discovery solution for all the members of the consortium, with ease of use for our customers and for staff fulfilling those those requests.” That sparked his interest in becoming a development partner for Rapido Consortial Borrowing, an ILS-agnostic solution by Ex Libris, from Clarivate.

OhioLINK is also a development partner. OhioLINK and its academic libraries have been working with a large group of public libraries across the state called SearchOhio. Currently, both SearchOhio and OhioLINK use Innovative's INN-Reach to share resources within their respective groups. The peer-to-peer tool from Innovative allows these two INN-Reach systems to borrow from each other. The Rapido Consortial Borrowing tool is designed to replace and upgrade the existing peer-to-peer tool, offering enhanced resource sharing capabilities across different platforms. “Right now, we're working with the SearchOhio public libraries to get the new Rapido Consortial Borrowing platform set-up, and it's going really well,” enthuses Pawlowski. “I’m excited because in the past, if a user didn’t find an item it in the OhioLINK catalog, they had to know where to go to search the SearchOhio catalog. In the new environment, everything is stacked inside the same browser so the OhioLINK user doesn’t have to click out, and I anticipate we’ll see usage go much higher.”

Measuring and communicating the value of partnership

Usage statistics are one way to measure the value of consortial borrowing, but Acosta shares his view. “Don’t ever take the basic core premise of consortial borrowing for granted,” he advises. “Whenever I’m addressing our stakeholders, I always remind them that while the county library holds about a million titles, we provide access to 45 million titles, and we didn’t have to buy any of them. It's because of these great relationships that we have in the library world. We almost take it for granted because we’ve always shared. Never shy away from telling that story of the multiplier effect, and I recommend you talk about it every chance you get.”

Pawlowski echoes the point, noting that it’s about being able to talk about your value in ways that make sense to those who are not in the library industry. “At OhioLINK, we recently engaged an economist to come and do a value study,” she explains. “We did that for the consortium as a whole, and then we did individual studies showing value for each institution. For OhioLINK, for every dollar invested, we deliver $11 in value through group negotiations, purchases, and sharing resources. For each institution, we looked at usage and told them how much things would cost if they were not in OhioLINK and would have had to purchase themselves. The savings were astronomical. That effectively highlights the exceptional skills and efficiency of the OhioLINK team and OhioLINK librarians, telling an impactful story about their expertise and dedication.”

The textbook affordability problem: investing in a solution

At the University of Central Florida, Beau Case serves as Inaugural Dean of University Libraries. He describes how he took on the challenge of tight budgets and equitable resource access using another Ex Libris solution. “I've worked in academic libraries for forty years, and in financial times both good and bad, it has always been nearly impossible to get additional funding, but I found a way,” he relates. “Textbook affordability is a big deal on our campus. Our library does it really well, but we still had 500 textbooks assigned every year for which the library had the e-book, and no amount of outreach to the faculty was reducing that number. Students were spending $2.8 million a year on those textbooks. My solution was to license the Ex Libris product Leganto and my argument to the provost and president was, with additional funding, we can make this happen. In our first year we exceeded expectations: $2.9 million in savings, and that doesn't include the summer session.”

Extending consortial relationships beyond borrowing

Libraries are discovering that consortium value extends beyond the sharing of collections into other kinds of partnerships, as Acosta describes: “Several years ago, our consortiums faced a rather soul-searching crossroads because one of our academic partners was going be implementing a software system and they weren’t going to be able to participate in lending. They offered, ‘Do you want us to bow out of the consortium?’ Our emotional gut response was, no. We'll figure something out. That led to us asking, ‘Why are we limiting ourselves to just resource sharing?’“ As it happens, the county board of supervisors had passed a declaration on the importance of access to accurate health information, so the libraries in the consortium developed an online public awareness program. They drew on the academic libraries’ LibGuides and health services librarians for the content, and the public libraries leveraged their partnerships with the region’s transportation system to place public service posters at bus, trolley and train stops. “That was our first experiment around ‘What can we do together utilizing each of our talents?’” recalls Acosta. “Since then, we did another round of joint programming around issues of environmental sustainability, and we're in the planning stages for our third program.”

Similarly, Case explains, “the University of Central Florida, the University of Florida, University of South Florida, and Florida Gulf Coast University are working on a water research portal, which will be available to industry, researchers, and the community statewide.” Another initiative, out of Florida Gulf Coast University, is about joining forces for a research data repository. “We’re happy to partner in making researchdata available to the public andcholars,” Case shares. “The consortium, our great relationships, and these individuals who are accustomed to working together bring about more partnership.”

According to Case, another avenue academic libraries have for promoting equitable access are their institutional repositories. “We need to think bigger—they're not just places to store stuff and preserve it,” he asserts. “They're places to disseminate information, to market ideas, to increase access. At UCF, we're using our IR to load curriculum materials. We have both K–12 materials and higher-ed materials. The latest in higher ed is teaching and learning with AI, and we are the international repository for that. Textbooks are expensive for students and for teachers, and we offer the repository for free. I'm excited about finally realizing the potential of our IR.”

A call to libraries and librarians: “Be a little less humble.”

According to Pawlowski, it is the job of herself and her team to express the value of what they do to the people that make decisions. “When I think of fair access, I think of showing the value that librarians bring to a community. We’re doing such amazing work, yet we're so humble,” she muses. She shares that the OhioLINK member value studies found a strong correlation coefficient of .925 between staffing at each library and the amount of resources used. To librarians, she avers, “It’s plain and simple to us: when a library is appropriately staffed, the more your users are going to use those resources. And, there are a lot of studies that show that when students use the library, they're more successful academically. I would love to see us connect these dots and talk more about the value of those who are working in libraries, making sure that we're getting materials into the hands of students.”

Discover how an ILS-agnostic resource sharing system can help your library consortium navigate budget challenges while ensuring equitable access to resources – learn more about Rapido Consortial Borrowing.

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