collaboration's the word

• By: Pamela Graham
• On: 07/27/2010 15:02:06
• In: SALALM Conferences

Monday was filled with panels on collaboration, where I spent most of my time. (Really sorry to miss all the other excellent presentations on Monday and yesterday's Pecha Kucha or however you spell it. Thanks for everyone who has shared their thoughts, slides and all the tweeting)
I'll soon get my slides on the 2CUL Cornell-Columbia initiative up. Two of the other panels on collaboration brought up a wealth of ideas. We heard a lot about what works and what's different today about collaboration. I think there definitely has to be an alignment of certain pressures AND certain support to make this work. We heard from Dora Loh about Calafia and how they are moving forward, taking advantage of existing and emerging infrastructure in California for sharing print and coordinating acquisitions. Check out their site for descriptions of agreements. Denise Hibay walked us through the analysis of collections that was done as some major shifts and redirections took place at the NYPL. She shared an interesting schema for describing and categorizing collections--hope that will be available soon. Angela Carreno spoke about their cloud library project--understanding overlap between digital content and files deposited in the Hathi trust, digital content and overlap in the shared ReCAP facility. Can a library source what it needs from these digital and print repository "clouds" instead of duplicating the effort to store and manage print? Read more of this OCLC supported project. We heard more about Dartmouth and Brown's "boutique" collaboration for Brazil and Miguel Valladares showed us his impressive report analyzing LANE collections--how did he do this all with nothing more than regular WorldCat searches? Search strings are included for those of you who want to try this at home (but maybe not alone).
Take aways? We need to have a place on the SALALM website where we can centrally list all existing collaborative arrangements.
Perhaps we should have a preconference on collaboration next year. Start with having the regional groups work on this at their next meetings, and come to the preconference ready for a structured type of discussion or exercise.
We must work with vendors on this--they are an important part of the picture. Collaboration won't work without them.
faculty buy-in is key, as well as educating users about what we are doing and how this affects how they work and where they will find what they need.