Consortia: Camelot, NERL

1
Consortia Camelot, NERL Star Alliance

• Ann Okerson
• OCLC Members Council
• Sunday, February 9, 2003
• ann.okerson_at_yale.edu

2
Not quite as old as the hills

• See James J. Kopp, Library Consortia and
  Information Technology The Past, the Present,
  the Promise. In Information Technology and
  Libraries. Volume 17, Number 1, March 1998,
  Special Issue about Library Consortia, John F.
  Helmer, Guest Editor
• From the Latin word, used by 17th century with
  regard to husband/wife relationship
• Broader meaning of partnership arose in 1820s
• Melvil Dewey wrote about library cooperation in
  LJ in 1886
• Science and education in 1950s and onward
• Part of the library vocabulary by 1972

3
How they grew (Kopp)

• Year Founded
• 1931-40
• 1941-50
• 1951-60
• 1961-70
• American Library Directory
• 2003 ICOLC

• Number
• 2
• 3
• 5
• 115
• Lists thousands in North America
• Currently about 175 worldwide, focused on
  electronic content procurement/licensing

4
The 1960s age of expansion

• Key factors in consortial opportunities
• The growth of higher education
• The growth of research and publication
• The development of library automation
• For accomplishing tasks in technical processing
• For support of resource sharing
• For cost reduction
• (The early days of todays OCLC)

5
The 1970s and 80s the age of the bibliographical
utility

• OCLC matures RLG, WLN, UTLAS founded
• Leading to the subsequent transformation of
  library technical services staffing operations
• Rapid increase in the number of consortia,
  through
• Further maturation of technologies, beyond
  automation to the development of integrated
  library systems
• Possibility of joining several groups to achieve
  different purposes

6
The 1990s technological growth spurt for content

• Development and growth of electronic networking
  technologies everyone gets wired
• Killer apps such as e-mail, WWW, etc.
• Deluge of old and new materials now in e-form
• High e-demand/acceptance/expectations of library
  users
• High prices for e-content services
• Willingness of producers to negotiate with groups
  of libraries saves for all parties
• Willingness of certain government agencies to
  infuse new money in support of e-access

7
Some recent developments

• 1995 Both Britannica and Academic Press
  announce advantages for consortial licenses and
  encourage them
• 1995-96 As a result, NERL was founded
• 1997 Founding formal meeting of COC with
  vendors in Missouri, 30 consortia (13th meeting
  in March 2003)
• Sometime in the 1990s states began to allocate
  funds for public digital library collections
  at different levels of ambition well documented
  by Arnold Hirshon et al.

8
Some recent developments (2)

• 1998
• COC develops public sites, statements, COC
  meeting agendas broaden beyond specific
  e-products to services, issues, discussion groups
• Defines itself as international in scope, as
  ICOLC
• 1999 e-COLC begins annual meetings
• 1999 SOLINET brokers first MCL (an opportunity
  that has not scaled well)
• 2003 ICOLC has grown to 175 consortia, with
  high overseas visibility (61 US, 10 Canada, 29
  ROW

9
Consortia-land is not Camelot

• Consortial activities are resource-intensive,
  i.e., take a lot of time and effort
• Demands on consortia are growing as content
  offerings to consortia grow
• Some consortia may be too big some too small
• Recent NERL expansion with CIRLA libraries
• We havent yet truly broken any pricing
  barriers
• The national and local economies are awful
• And we need new alliances to solve bigger
  problems, unaddressed by consortia today

10
Consortia-land is not Camelot (2)

• Many unaffiliated schools and libraries
• Consortia vary greatly loose, tight, state,
  regional, publicly funded, privately funded,
  national, multi-national, focused-tasking,
  multi-tasking, big, small takes some
  understanding
• Multiple groups exist (not all are consortia
  some are membership groups) -- and libraries
  need to understand how and where they fit

11
Time for some definitions ?

• Definitions are loose at best
• Consortia are organizations of organizations
  (not people) that have banded together explicitly
  to get a job done or to meet a set of objectives
• These vary in geographical range and scope
• Subscription or dues or for-fee services are not
  consortia though they may be consultative and
  communicative e.g., JSTOR, LUNA Insight
• Membership organizations are not consortia,
  though they are definitely consultative and
  communicative i.e., ARL, DLF
• Are partnerships the same as consortia?
• Then there are hybrids OCLC, NELINET, RLG, CRL

12
Making sense of it all at Yale

• Bibliographical OCLC, (NELINET), RLG each with
  consortial and non-consortial) aspects
• Broad-based regional consortia NELLCO, NERL
• Resource/Doc Delivery National Network of
  Libraries of Medicine, BorrowDirect
• Area Studies, many including
• East Coast Consortium of Slavic Library
  Collections, Northeast Asia librarians, Latin
  America (LANE, LASIC) , CRL filming programs, ARL
  global resources, etc.
• Highly focused Papyrus project (APIS), Yale
  hospital consortium

13
NERL present future

• A regional consortium
• Started with 16 ARL-member libraries now at 26
  (majority private but many public) 40 affiliates
• Core members knew each other from before
• Easy proximity for meetings and resource sharing
• Steady growth, largely because of content
  licensing critical mass and success
• Flexible rules for contracts and projects
• Low bureaucracy, low dues
• Will continue to grow but with caution
• Expanding sub programs include
• Research projects, Support of area studies

14
Some of the bigger problems

• Many very large problems remain unsolved
• Rapidly increasing amount of content is almost
  beyond our comprehension
• Rapidly increasing diverse formats and media,
  electronic being the most recent
• Dynamic, wildly heterogeneous e-content we
  arent even aware of just what and how much
• We dont know (at all well enough) what to do
  about preserving e-content
• Have-not nations (eIFL, HINARI, Agora, etc. but
  need much, much more)

15
Sidney Harris, in the New Yorker, May 27, 2002
16
a universal collection of knowledge and
creativity from mission statement of Library
of Congress
www.lighthousemaps.com
17
(No Transcript)
18
Moores Law (and Stilles corollary)

• The speed of personal computers (and all others)
  will double every 18 months
• The constant improvements and changes in the
  computer industry mean that we are producing more
  and more information every day but also that we
  are bound to lose more information now than at
  any time in the past. -Alexander Stille, The
  future of the past, New York, 2002, p. xx.

19
(No Transcript)
20
Challenge? Opportunity?

• The e-challenges are HUGE and costly
• In e-world, many aspects of our content
  activities should be done only once or twice, and
  done well
• Traditional collections development and
  management
• e- preservation efforts
• Build national (or international?) digital
  libraries in many key subjects libraries so
  complete and well-organized as to eliminate
  duplicative efforts
• Sharing these challenges calls for structures we
  are only beginning to imagine (though were good
  at developing agendas)

21
(No Transcript)
22
Star Alliance rules

• The Alliance itself is global in coverage
• Largely non-duplicative, cooperative
• High value to customers in that mileage is
  portable across airlines, i.e., empowering
• Some small difference in service, i.e., customer
  does better within own airline sphere
• High value to participating companies
• NOTE There is more than one alliance
• CAUTION not a financial panacea

23
Star Alliance as a metaphor

• Passengers are our users (without them no planes,
  no airlines, no alliances)
• The planes are our libraries, of varying shapes
  and sizes, serving local users and needs
• Airlines are our consortia that accomplish big
  single, or huge multi-library tasks, probably
  regionally?
• The alliance(s) is the aggregation of all these
  kinds of efforts into partnerships pointed
  purposefully at solving global problems
• We each need to understand where in this metaphor
  our efforts can best be directed

24
Star Alliance to Star Trek

• Todays library consortia show the way
• They have a long history
• They are mostly task and region-oriented
• Building consortia for many appears to be an
  administrative convenience, for acquisitions,
  storage, licensing
• But, it can and should be much more than that
• Building appropriate, productive alliances has
  got to become libraries new core competency at a
  scale as never before

25
In the distant future, what could happen to
consortia?

• Think of the European Union
• Common Market ? common currency ? common
  governance?
• When does the entity created to serve a community
  become an equal or even the dominant government
  in a community?
• Will it? Whats the tipping point?
• Incorporate consortia separate from any one home
  institution, making them the coordinating point
  of their library chain
• The European Library project (gate to Europes
  knowledge)

26
To boldly go where no library
27
References selected URLs

• NERL ltwww.library.Yale.edu/NERLpublicgt
• NELLCO lthttp//www.nellco.org/gt
• Hirshon report lthttp//www.nelinet.net/arhishon/m
  blc/mblc-report.htmgt
• ICOLC ltwww.library.yale.edu/consortiagt
• LAMP ltwwwcrl.uchicago.edu/info/lamp.htmgt
• ECCSL ltwww.princeton.edu/nshapiro/eastconsrt.htm
  lgt
• APIS ltwww.columbia.edu/dlc/apis/
• HINARI http//www.healthinternetwork.net/
• eIFL lthttp//www.eifl.net/gt
• The European Library ltwww.europeanlibrary.orggt