THE FUTURE OF COLLABORATIVE COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT AMONG RESEARCH LIBRARIES

Collaborative collection development works well for libraries in consortia to acquire shared electronic resources, and libraries sharing information about holdings in obscure and hard-to

Steven A Knowlton University of Memphis, April 2, 2010 Good morning, it’s great to be here in Memphis

Mary asked me to speak this morning on “The

Future of Collaborative Collection Development

among Research Libraries.” I’ll be doing that

shortly, but I thought you might like to hear a

little about me and my background first I’m a

graduate of the other U of M – Michigan, that

is, and went on to study librarianship at Wayne

State University in Detroit Since 2005 I have

worked at the publishing firm ProQuest – you

may be familiar with some of our databases such

as ProQuest Dissertations & Theses,

ABI/INFORM, and HeritageQuest My roles at

ProQuest have involved what we call

“consultative solutions”: that is, working closely

with customers to identify their collection

development interests, and finding ways that

ProQuest can help meet their users’ needs

While I have been working for a commercial

publisher, I have also been active in library

research and have had peer-reviewed articles

published, as well as serving on the ALA

Continuing Resources Section Committee on

Holdings Information On a personal note, my

hobbies include flag-spotting and playing the

electric bass – I’m really hoping to make it down

to the Stax studio museum and worship at the

shrine of “Duck” Dunn

But enough about the past, let’s think about the

future I’d like to get a little poll going just

raise your hand if you:

 Use Google

 Email colleagues at other libraries

 Use Facebook or MySpace

 Use wikis

 Pull documents from Institutional

repositories

Well, then, you’ve already got one foot into the

future of collaborative collection development

In a little bit I’ll explain what I mean, but before

that we should talk about what is collaborative

collection development and how it’s done these

days Let’s talk about:

 Current efforts at collaborative collection development

 Challenges to the models in place right

now

 How technology is both shaping

efforts to respond to those challenges

and making new models available

And throughout, we’ll be talking about how an institution like the McWherter Library can play

a role in collaborative collection development

Collaborative collection development is simple

in concept but more challenging in practice In concept: similar libraries at different institutions can work cooperatively to manage collections with several purposes in mind:

 Achieve cost savings for electronic

products by leveraging collective buying power

 Reduce duplication of rarely used print

materials

 Develop preservation plans to ensure

that the last copy of a title is not weeded The key to this idea is that the cooperating libraries have to view their various collections not separately but as a larger body that serves scholars at all the cooperating institutions The most common model for collaborative

collection development is the consortium This

idea is well-known at Memphis, because you are part of several consortia: the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries, LYRASIS, Tenn-Share Consortia often apply their efforts

to the first goal of collaborative collection development, buying electronic resources in bulk

Publishers will often seek out consortium deals,

for a couple reasons One is short-term gains:

rather than have an individual price point that

forces some libraries out of the market, a

consortium deal allows more libraries to

subscribe, result in a cumulative value of all the

subscriptions that may be greater than selling

individually and losing some customers because

of the higher price But equally important is

exposure to new users A person’s college years

are when information-seeking habits are formed

– if a future researcher grows accustomed to

using a particular database, then demand for that

database will continue in other libraries as that

researcher moves on in his or her career

So, the consortium is one model of collaborative

collection development: it does a great job of

keeping prices down for commonly used

resources Another model of collection

development addresses the opposite problem:

how to handle acquisitions of scarce but vital

materials?

Think of it this way: libraries often buy books on

the “just in case” principle – let’s get this book

in a field our researchers study, “just in case”

someone needs it And the result is that

libraries hold a lot of books that never had the

“just in case” occasion arise It’s a pretty

common finding in library use studies that books

on the shelf don’t circulate much: one group of

Connecticut libraries discovered that over half

its books hadn’t been checked out once in the

last decade

And that’s just books that a librarian honestly

believes somebody will use There are lots of

books that one researcher in a million wants –

covering the minutest subset of knowledge in an

esoteric discipline So most libraries won’t even

bother with the obscure stuff But really,

somebody needs to have those obscure books on

hand, for that Ph.D student who’s chasing down

his last bit of data on the post-structuralist

critiques of the hermeneutics of quantum

gravity And that’s why libraries collaborate to

make sure this type of material gets collected

somewhere, but definitely not here

There are a number of initiatives to insure that

the most important of the obscure and foreign

titles are acquired, but at the same time too many libraries don’t waste their money on books

that won’t be read For example, the Center for

Research Libraries is a consortium in the sense that it receives its funding from member libraries – but it collects scarce materials such as newspapers, foreign books and microfilm, and

stores them in a warehouse in Chicago

Member libraries call upon the warehouse to ship the materials as needed Recent initiatives

of the CRL include microfilming newspapers from the African nation of Liberia, and collecting British doctoral dissertations The advantage to members of CRL is, of course, that their contributions to the CRL budget allow them access to unique materials without having

to purchase and maintain them

Other efforts in collaborative collection development are organized by the Library of Congress To help with collaborative collection

of foreign materials, the Cooperative Acquisitions Program operates branch offices

around the world to gather hard-to-find

materials in places such as India, South America and East Africa, and make them available to participating libraries

One seemingly outdated but still surprisingly

useful tool is the National Union Catalog The NUC is a gigantic set of books containing

copies of the catalog cards for virtually every book held at a large research library in the United States before 1956 This tool allowed libraries to determine whether a particular scarce book existed anywhere in the country, so they could borrow it rather than purchasing another

copy The reason I say it’s still useful is that

many libraries never completely converted their card catalogs into online versions – so that more than a quarter of the titles in the NUC aren’t found in web-based catalogs

And speaking of web-based catalogs, the last tool I’ll discuss for avoiding duplication of obscure books is the OCLC WorldCat database Libraries who are members of OCLC – and that

includes most university libraries in America –

upload their holdings to a massive database hosted by the OCLC organization in Dublin,

Ohio (just outside Columbus – and the original

home of Wendy’s hamburgers) All the other

libraries can use WorldCat to find

limited-interest books and borrow them through

interlibrary loan

Interlibrary loan: I’ve said the dreaded words

The drawback to all the efforts I’ve just

described is, of course, that relying on other

libraries to hold titles means they have to be

loaned via courier – necessitating a delay Most

libraries feel that the tradeoff is worth is it,

however – delayed access for the book that

might only be used once is better than spending

money on books with little anticipated use

That said, collaborative collection development

for scarce books is not done only by national

organizations Regional groups also maintain

communication in order to facilitate access –

such as the California Cooperative Latin

American Collection Development Group

This group of ten university libraries meets

twice a year to discuss which libraries are

planning to acquire materials in which areas of

Latin American studies, and thus make

appropriate acquisitions plans to avoid

duplication For example, one library may

collect Caribbean serials, and another will

therefore avoid acquiring those materials

Memphis has some special collections, like the

Center for Earthquake Research or the

Mississippi Valley Collection, and there may be

an opportunity to work with other specialized

libraries to formulate collaborative collection

development plans – for example, Berkeley’s

National Information Service for Earthquake

Engineering, or The Louisiana and Lower

Mississippi Valley Collections (LLMVC) at

Louisiana State The drawbacks of delayed

access would of course have to be carefully

weighed against the savings in the acquisitions

budget

I’ve been talking about books, but print serials

are another important part of this discussion

Most libraries used to aim to collect a complete

run of their serial subscriptions – hence the

effort devoted to check-in and claims But with

collaborative collection development, those

less-used journals might have shorter runs at several

different institutions, and still make the entire

run available to researchers Communication about holdings is key to making this idea work It’s not all upside to this kind of collaborative

collection development, however Libraries

have long relied on that wonderful experience called serendipity – when you find one item you need in the catalog – then go to get it off the shelf and find another book right next to it that

will also serve your research There’s no

serendipity in interlibrary loan – you just have to hope that the catalogers and indexers assigned the kind of headings your researcher is looking under But hopefully some good bibliographic instruction is going on and researchers are also learning how to use citations to get to the resources they need

A complement to the efforts against duplication

of low-use materials is the establishment of informal standards to help libraries understand

the materials that every collection should have

The American Library Association – a body consisting entirely of librarians from various

institutions working collaboratively – issues

recommendations on “Outstanding” titles in various fields, such as “Outstanding Reference Sources”, “Notable Books for Adults,” and many others These lists are assembled on a

yearly basis and reflect newly published titles

In addition, there are ALA-sponsored lists of

“Core Collections”: essential works in a field that no self-respecting bibliographer should omit Other core collection lists are available from the H.W Wilson publishing company, and many specialized library organizations such as the Medical Library Association These lists are

an example of collaborative collection development because they draw on the wisdom

of many experienced librarians about which titles are most important to gaining the basic knowledge of a discipline

Collaborative collection development works well for libraries in consortia to acquire shared electronic resources, and libraries sharing information about holdings in obscure and hard-to-acquire materials One last element of collaborative collection development is an area that is part of the ethical obligation of libraries, but that some users and other stakeholders may

place less value upon: I’m speaking of

preservation Libraries – particularly research

libraries – have a duty to make sure that

information is preserved, whether digitally, in

paper or in microform (or clay tablets with

cuneiform, if you happen to be an Assyriology

library.) But that’s a budget item that can be

hard to justify to the regents

Again, collaborative collection development is

part of the solution A library should never

discard the “last” existing copy of an item – so

when weeding decisions are being made, the

OCLC database can be a handy guide to

knowing whether other copies of an item exist

elsewhere In this example, the library is the

only one holding a copy of this book – so be

extra cautious about throwing it out In

addition, the vast network of librarians on blogs,

emails and wikis is another way to share

preservation data – I remember when the

University of Hawaii suffered a mudslide, they

were all set to replace a large microfiche

collection by purchasing it from ProQuest – and

then another institution emailed to donate its

copy that they were planning to de-accession

anyway A tough day for the sales rep, but an

outstanding example of collaboration between

libraries

In preserving digital materials, some libraries are

faced with the daunting task of either printing

out or saving to disk all the journals and

database materials they subscribe to – just in

case the original publisher fails to maintain the

file, or the subscription terminates

Fortunately, another collaborative project called

LOCKSS (for Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe)

exists to preserve digital material automatically

in a peer-to-peer network If one institution’s

digital copies are corrupted, they are replaced

with good copies from another institution

There are other digital preservation methods, but

LOCKSS is the best example of one born from

collaboration between libraries

From leveraging collective purchasing power, to

locating scarce materials, to working together on

preservation, there’s a lot that collaborative

collection development is already doing in

research libraries

But another surprising truth as that many

libraries don’t participate fully in the

collaborative collection development organizations they belong to They may continue to purchase materials that they know other libraries already have, or they might ignore collective decisions about the division of responsibility in collecting for a discipline Several factors influence resistance to completely collaborative collection development They include:

 Concerns about sacrificing a library’s

autonomy

 Reluctance to rely on another institution

to supply part of the collection

 The complexity and time-consuming

commitment

 Fears that costs will outweigh benefits

 And, as we discussed, delays in meeting

user needs Regarding autonomy: librarians are professionals, highly trained for independent judgment So when libraries are divvying up collection responsibilities – it may be considered

slightly offensive to be told one may not buy a

title – even when it’s felt that a local copy is

important to have And tied to that is a perhaps

reasonable lack of trust in other institutions Sure, they say they’re picking up everything of value in Puerto Rican literature, but how can we

be sure? And when that professor needs that anthology of Angel Lozada or that Fall 2007

issue of Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos,

will it really be available?

Librarians are also busy people, and who’s got time to keep coordinating with six other libraries about collection decisions? Some would rather just go ahead and directly acquire the materials

they want And finally, there’s a certain

amount of concern about costs – if I’m buying all these Dominican titles, and the other library

is doing Puerto Rico, how do we know they’re not getting the better deal? We could be

spending that money on titles we feel certain our

researchers need

What’s to be done about lack of cooperation in collaboration? Aside from changing human

nature, only binding agreements can have an

effect One method that’s been proposed in

several consortia is to require all members to use

the same book jobber – and to limit that jobber

from selling duplicate titles within the

consortium That way, member libraries

couldn’t buy duplicate titles even if they wanted

to I’m not aware of any consortia that have

actually adopted that plan, however

So we’ve seen some of the reasons for

collaborative collection development – to save

money, avoid duplication, and manage

preservation – and some of the natural human

impulses to distrust collaboration But the title

of my talk is the future of collaborative

collection development, so it’s about time we

talked about that!

Like everything in libraries, there are some basic

pressures and opportunities caused by outside

forces that will have an effect on collaborative

collection development The first we’ll address

is budgets The second is technology And

you’re waiting for a third, aren’t you? I’ll

share a little marketing secret – research shows

that people respond better to an odd number; it

catches your eye because of a psychological

quirk that makes us pay more attention to odd

numbers than to even numbers So almost any

advertisement will have 3 or 5 selling points

But I’m not trying to sell you anything, and

these two are enough to worry about

Back to my actual point – budgets! We’re

living through the worst economy since this

place was called West Tennessee State, and the

state government is cutting funds to universities

just as almost every other state is And, not

surprisingly but inconveniently – serials prices

continue to squeeze the rest of the collection

budget

Now, collaborative collection development, at

least in terms of consortium buying, was

intended as a salve for sore budgets But there

are some other developments that have been

cropping up in some places that I think we’ll see

spread because they are effective cost-cutters

They include:

 Managing off-site storage collaboratively

 A national effort to collaborate between

consortia on rationalizing print holdings

 Joint operations between public libraries

and universities

 Collaborative digitization to save money

and improve distribution of resources

 Contributing to open web document

portals such as Google Books and Open Content Alliance

Hey – I said technology was the second point, and a lot of these are technology solutions! Well, that’s interesting Technology is often a driver of change because it reduces cost, as well

as making information more freely available In addition to these solutions, I’ll address some technology-driven changes that are less cost-centered in a few minutes

As we discussed, libraries everywhere are looking for savings through collaboration One

place to start is through saving space Open

shelves in a library are costly – one estimate is

25 cents per book per year in overhead costs Putting the same materials in a closed storage unit drops those costs considerably, besides

being better for preservation Offsite storage is

becoming more accepted to researchers because collaborative collection development, with its reliance on interlibrary loan, has been part of the library landscape for several decades now, and researchers are accustomed to the wait to receive material

But some libraries are taking that idea farther – groups of universities in southern California, Missouri and Ohio have pooled their offsite storage collections into single buildings that serve the entire region, saving on the cost of operating separate buildings For most, that’s the extent of the savings Each library continues to manages its offsite collection within

the shared building separately However, a

couple groups in central Colorado and Massachusetts have begun managing their

offsite collections collaboratively – for example,

making deaccessioning decisions based upon the

entire corpus of books in storage, managing

interlibrary loan requests for the collection as a

whole, and operating a union catalog – with

universal circulation rights for all the

participating institutions This solution couples

cost savings with truly collaborative collection

development that serves a large community of

researchers This may be a trend that gains

traction – as libraries face space shortages (as

they all do eventually) and no funds to expand,

cooperative offsite storage will become an

attractive alternative

It’s interesting to note that some offsite storage

facilities may be quite a distance from the main

library – Harvard’s is 35 miles away – so if

Memphis were to undertake a cooperative

storage project, collaboration with places as far

away as Ole Miss or Arkansas State could be

possible, as well as working with more local

libraries like UT-Health Science Center,

Christian Brothers University, Crichton College,

Rhodes College or Lemoyne-Owen College I

hope I haven’t betrayed my ignorance of some

deep-seated rivalries with this suggestion

Storage isn’t the only way that costs can be cut,

however If holdings can be reduced through

collaborative collection management, then even

less space will need to be rented There is

nationwide initiative that is looking to create a

unique method for managing collections to

reduce duplicate print holdings, called

"Preserving America's Print Resources" The

Center for Research Libraries recently

commissioned a report on proposed methods for

governance of regional and even national

collections in specialized disciplines The plan

is for cooperation between consortia to

determine the extent of holdings nationally and

to develop plans to judiciously cull unneeded

duplicates and manage the remaining collections

under best practices for preservation This

project promises to have guidelines in place

within three years, and its final outcome will be

“to reduce the costs systematically and

significantly and to increase the accessibility of

heavily redundant serials holdings.” It promises

to be an important change with massive

ramifications for the holdings policies at

research libraries, including this one The

librarians at Memphis should be prepared for

plenty of questions from their colleagues at

Lyrasis about holdings, collection management

and preservation practices, and local priorities

Lyrasis will gather information from all its members and report back to the national steering committee of "Preserving America's Print Resources" The conversations about collection development policies will be easy, because Memphis already has well-documented policies

in place

The need to save costs isn’t limited to university libraries, obviously; public libraries are facing

many of the some budget difficulties In a few

cities, universities and municipalities have taken the bold step of unifying their libraries, including the collections San Jose State University and Metropolitan State University in

St Paul, are two universities who have

undertaken collaborative library projects The

San Jose library is an absolutely beautiful structure with strong collections of both popular and scholarly material The goal of the joint library is to provide community members with access to the broadest possible range of materials, and to support the University’s educational mission by leveraging its collection

to expand knowledge among more users

The challenges of such an approach include

managing a large collection for sets of users with different expectations For example, the San Jose city council recently voted down a proposal to install internet filters – an issue that

is not very common in academic libraries

Shared funding can have its perils as well – when budgets are tighter in one entity than another, both may suffer For example, the San Jose library had to cut its hours recently, entirely due to municipal shortages; in this case, the students at the university are enduring the consequences even though their funding didn’t

fall short

However, the attraction of shared space remains

as a way to cut overhead and improve community outreach For universities undertaking new library construction in the future, unification with public libraries may come to be seen as an investment with long-term budget benefits

Even if libraries aren’t willing to go as far as

operating a shared building, universities and

public libraries can benefit from collaborative

collection development For example, New

York University, Columbia University and the

New York Public Library have an agreement

allowing holders of a library card at one library

to use the other libraries With that in mind,

each library monitors the others’ collections and

focuses its acquisitions on areas where the others

are not collecting They meet once a year to

discuss issues in collection management as well

It’s not a formal collaboration but it does help

manage costs and serve users of both

universities and the public library

Dr Ford mentioned her interest in making the

McWherter library a resource for the Mid-South

community beyond campus, and perhaps a more

structured collaborative collection development

plan with Memphis Public Library is one way to

approach this goal

Again, as budgets force libraries to reconsider

how they’re spending their funds, cooperation

between universities and public libraries may

come to be seen as an attractive choice

Storage, inter-consortial cooperation and

public/university library unification are some

ways of addressing budget problems for print

material But many libraries are moving toward

digitized materials as another cost savings

That seems counter-intuitive, as digitization has

a high upfront cost But if digitization can

reduce other costs, it can be a cost-saver

Consider the costs of access, particularly for

rare and unpublished materials – such as the

manuscripts in the Mississippi Valley

Collection Archivists must oversee the

researchers, special acid-free binding materials

must be prepared, and so on And for

researchers from elsewhere, the travel to

Memphis is a big cost

If instead, materials are posted online in digital

format, then access costs are reduced to the price

of maintaining files on a server Not really

nothing, but minimal It pays off if the costs of

digitization is less than the cost of access over

the next several years

And digitization can now be done at a lower cost

to the library Lyrasis has created the Mass Digitization Collaborative – it’s a program that

is operated out of Lyrasis libraries, and accepts contributions from any member library

Members save the costs of setting up an

in-house digitization project, as well as taking

advantage of economies of scale because Lyrasis digitizes so many documents, and the per-document cost is lower than it would be if a

library digitized its own materials Digitization

saves the host library money on the costs of access – and it saves the collaborating libraries

money on travel costs to view the materials

Furthermore, the Lyrasis Mass Digitization Initiative eliminates redundant scanning: all the Lyrasis libraries host their digitized material in a common repository, so that documents don’t accidentally get digitized twice And of course

it offers instant access to researchers

And that brings me to the fourth technology-based cost saver we’ll discuss Earlier, we talked about how collaborative collection development cuts down on acquisitions costs by eliminating the need for cooperating libraries to

purchase duplicate titles; however, it does

impose the costs of interlibrary loan, which some sources estimate between 20 and 30

dollars per title Digitization is helping to

eliminate even that cost, as a digitized titles doesn’t have to be checked out, sent in the mail

or checked in There are a number of ways for

libraries to furnish digitized material to assist with collaborative collection development You may have heard of the Google Books

program Google is working with several of

the very largest research libraries – it started with Stanford and Harvard but now includes 20 libraries, including some in Europe and Japan –

to digitize books on their shelves and make them

searchable in Google For out-of-copyright

books, the entire text may be read, but for books

in copyright, only snippets are available The snippets are helpful to determine whether the book is a useful resource that a researcher wants

to acquire through traditional ILL Although

Google Books is a handy way to acquire

digitized books, Google’s policies and practices

are quite controversial, as they are scanning all

the books on the shelf, in copyright or not,

without gaining the publishers’ permission; and

furthermore, there are a lot of concerns about a

commercial enterprise controlling content that

originated in a library Nonetheless – if you can

find a title in Google Books, that’s one ILL

request you don’t have to process

Other digitization projects include the Open

Content Alliance The OCA is also a mass

digitization project, but they only scan works

with the approval of the publisher Libraries

contributing to OCA include dozens of research

libraries around the world including many

members of Lyrasis Books scanned by OCA

are hosted in the same “Internet Archive” as the

documents scanned by Lyrasis Mass Digitization

Collaborative In addition to books, the Open

Content Alliance makes available computer

software, audio recordings, films and other

formats

Although Google Books and OCA represent the

most truly collaborative efforts at digital

collection development – because many

libraries’ holdings are available together –

individual libraries are expanding the reach of

their holdings with Institutional Repositories

IRs typically hold the digitized intellectual

output of a university’s students and faculty –

such as keystone projects for undergraduates,

and masters theses and doctoral dissertations,

along with research papers by faculty members

As these types of materials are among the most

frequently requested for interlibrary loan,

creating an IR can be a cost saver as well as

exposing research to a broader audience To

demonstrate, let’s look at UT-Martin’s

institutional repository – here’s the home page,

where you can browse in several categories or

search; and here’s page of search results: you

can see there are master’s projects, journal

articles, and even a privately published

book-length manuscript

Shared storage, public-university library

unification, interconsortial cooperation on print

holdings, mass digitization, open web document

portals – those are some of the ways that

collaborative collection development will be

responding to the budget difficulties we will be

facing But I think we’ll see technology impact

the way that librarians collaborate, as well

I’d win no prizes as a futurist by telling you that social networking software is going to change

the way people communicate But it’s still true

even if it’s obvious

You’ll recall I discussed that one of the reasons librarians may be reluctant to get involved with collaborative collection development is the complexity of organizing tasks among so many people Well, that kind of thing is a lot easier than it used to be Way back, people would actually have to go to meetings Then there were conference calls Then you could send an email and have your colleagues “reply to all”

and back and forth until your inbox was clogged

But now – you can set up a wiki – ask your colleagues what titles or disciplines they’re collecting, and everyone can add information on their own time, make comments on their colleagues’ choices, and by the end of a couple days you’ve got a consensus and nobody had to argue (out load, at least! – they might argue in

the wiki.) Easy peasy, as Jamie Oliver says In

this example, librarians at Ohio University have listed their favorite business directories Anyone with a password can log in and add an

entry or make a comment on an existing entry

It doesn’t have to be a wiki, per se You could use the comments function on a Facebook or a MySpace page, although that seems a bit

clumsy, and Google Docs and similar programs

have a functionality that allows many different users to work on a shared document that’s posted to a server In this example, after the original document was posted other users added changes, shown in pink highlight In all these ways, librarians working collaboratively can take advantage of social networking to share ideas, preferences, and priorities in the blink of

an eye As collaboration becomes easier, it may make collaborative collection development more feasible

Although technology is moving collaboration a lot further, I’d like to add one thought about a

place technology doesn’t appear to be taking us

Earlier this decade, librarians and scholars took the idea of collaboration beyond collection

development and into collaborative creation – in

the form of open access journals There has

been a lot of hope that open access journals

would help break the stranglehold of journal

publishers But it looks like the publishers will

be partners with us for a while, because open

access journals have not done much to displace

the more traditional titles One way of

measuring a journal’s value for researchers is

impact factor The impact factor is a

measurement of how often researchers refer to

articles published in a journal – the higher the

impact factor, the more researchers are using a

journal This slide shows the top 100 journals in

the sciences ranked by impact factor The only

open access journal in the list is in yellow Not

very near the top So, it seems that researchers

who want to access the most popular and

relevant journals will continue to ask libraries to

keep paying Lippincott Williams & Wilkins and

their ilk for some time to come

That said, I believe that collaborative collection

development holds a lot of promise First of all,

there is still progress to be made getting libraries

to overcome those barriers of autonomy and lack

of trust that are inhibiting cooperation; even if it

does require forcing a particular book jobber

down someone’s throat! Secondly, the library

community is making a serious effort with

Preserving America’s Print Resources to

rationalize print collections on a large scale

Third, digitization is becoming less expensive

and easier all the time, and the digital bounty

available for librarians and researchers is simply

astounding And finally, modern social

networking is making collaboration a snap

So there it is: the current state and future

prospects of collaborative collection

development in 40 minutes We’ve covered the

ways that libraries collaborate to save money,

manage holdings, and ensure preservation, and

talked about some of the reasons it doesn’t

always go as planned We’ve talked about how

budgets continue to be a problem, and how

cooperative storage, national print holdings

management and digitization can help, and

we’ve discussed social networking as a tool to

make collaboration easier It’s been a real

pleasure to go over this with you today, and if

you learned a fraction of what I did by putting this talk together, then I’m sure it’s been worthwhile

Tina Baich

University Library, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine interlibrary loan requests for open access materials submitted during fiscal years 2010 and 2011 and to determine the impact of open access materials upon fill rate for interlibrary borrowing requests.

Design/methodology/approach – Borrowing requests for open access materials were quantitatively analyzed and compared to total borrowing requests.

Findings – During the period studied, borrowing requests for open access materials increased while overall requests held steady As the number of requests filled with open access documents continues to rise, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis University Library is able to provide a service to users and cost savings for the library by utilizing this material The difficulty users have in navigating the online information environment makes it unlikely that interlibrary loan requests will decrease due to the growing amount of open access material available.

Originality/value – The literature discussing the use of open access materials to fulfill ILL requests is limited and largely focuses on educating ILL practitioners about open access and providing suggested resources for locating open access materials This research paper studies actual requests for open access materials and their impact on interlibrary loan.

Keywords Open access, Interlibrary loan, Interlending, Academic libraries

Paper type Research paper

Introduction

Even though open access materials are freely available on the

internet, library users still request them through interlibrary loan

(ILL) In February 2009, Indiana University-Purdue University

Indianapolis (IUPUI) University Library began tracking

borrowing requests for open access materials As the number

of requests filled with open access documents continues to grow,

IUPUI University Library is able to provide a service to users and

cost savings for the library by utilizing this material This paper

presents data regarding IUPUI University Library’s open access

ILL borrowing requests for fiscal years 2010 and 2011 and

describes some of the most commonly used online resources for

filling these requests.

Discussion of open access is generally focused on scholarly

journal publishing and the free availability of content either

directly from publishers or through the self-archiving efforts

of authors Proponents of open access in this context argue

that it allows for wider dissemination of scholarly work, thus

providing authors the opportunity for greater impact It also

lowers the cost barrier to providing content for libraries and,

in the academic world, gives the institution access to the

scholarly output of its faculty However, many other

documents fit the general criteria of open access: digital,

online content that is both free of charge and free of most

copyright and licensing restrictions (Suber, 2010) Based on

these criteria, I include conference papers, electronic theses

and dissertations (ETDs), and public domain works in my

discussion of open access ILL requests.

Literature review

There is no shortage of articles on open access, but very little tying open access to ILL In 2006, Karen Kohn encouraged ILL practitioners to find both free lenders and free materials

in order to lower ILL costs (Kohn, 2006, p 58) The section

on finding free materials describes “sites that list journals with free full-text access and databases that either include full text

or provide links to full text at publishers’ Web sites” (Kohn,

2006, p 61) Kohn also rightly suggests checking for online availability of commonly free materials such as government documents, reports, and white papers before attempting to borrow them Despite listing a number of resources for open access journal articles, Kohn never uses the term open access beyond recommending the Directory of Open Access Journals The sites the author recommends are still prominent sources for open access materials.

In the same year, Heather G Morrison discussed open access and its implications for resource sharing Morrison uses the majority of her article to provide an overview of open access, a list of specific open access resources, and a discussion of a Canadian library network knowledgebase, which includes records for open access journals Where she sets herself apart is in her presentation of possible implications of open access on resource sharing Early in the article, Morrison quotes Mike McGrath’s statement that open access “is one of the reasons for the decline in document delivery in many countries” (McGrath, 2005, p 43), but does

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at

www.emeraldinsight.com/0264-1615.htm

Interlending & Document Supply

40/1 (2012) 55 – 60

q Emerald Group Publishing Limited [ISSN 0264-1615]

[DOI 10.1108/02641611211214305]

Received 29 November 2011 Accepted 29 November 2011 Published with the kind permission of IFLA, www.ifla.org/

This paper was originally presented at the IFLA 12th Interlending & Document Supply Conference held in Chicago, Ilinois, 19-21 September 2011.