2018 Charleston Library Conference

The present state of library collection building is deeply engaged with interoperable networks. While we locally explore new data-driven collection building models, the growing strategic reliance on resource sharing programs helps to further reduce budgetary pressures. We also continue to explore new ways of sharing human expertise to flexibly address shifting collection priorities. The Brown Library, for example, explores joint collection development, joint processing, and resource sharing collaborations within the Ivies Plus libraries to allow users expedited accessibility to an ever-changing giant joint collection.

Looking a little further into the future, in a super-consortia ecosystem, strengthening the inter-reliance among communities of trust will become even more essential to further achieve economies of scale and allow balanced risk taking. In order to address future collections and staffing needs, we need to imagine ways by which we can build strong collaborative relations between remote individuals affiliated with giant cluster libraries. It is essential to create an infrastructure which produces network value which surpasses the significant overhead involved in sustaining such efforts.

In this presentation, Boaz Nadav-Manes, AUL for Access Services and Collection Management at Brown University, will describe his vision and the work behind chairing the Ivies Plus Vendor-Neutral Collection Lifecycle Platform Committee. The committee spent more than 2 years on collecting user stories, analyzing a solution, and pursue a future in which a flexible technological infrastructure allows decision makers within and outside the Ivies Plus libraries to collaborate, coordinate, and make better data-informed decisions on the network and the local level. Over time, the system can enable a reliance on befitting machine learning routines to allow community based, predictive approval profiles to also organically emerge. Recently, this initiative focuses on The Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP) as it pursues further collaborative collection building directions.