Building shared services more bang for your buck

Transcription

1 Building shared services more bang for your buck Anne Anderson Manager Bibliographic Services National Library of New Zealand Abstract: Many New Zealand libraries are benefiting from collaborative, collective or consortial arrangements that enable them to deliver more value for their customers than their funding would enable them to deliver alone. EPIC and the new agreement with OCLC are examples of whole of country deals; ELGAR and CONZULSys are examples of regional or community of interest agreements and there is a range of local resource-sharing arrangements. But how much more could we be doing in this space? I will report back on the outcome of my study, supported by the Edith Jessie Carnell travelling scholarship, looking at a range of library consortia and collaborative organisations, exploring why they chose the models they use, how they are managed and governed and identifying the costs, the benefits and the drawbacks and perhaps their sustainability over time. I hope to draw conclusions as to what might work for us in New Zealand libraries to ensure that we harness more of the creative thinking and synergy enabled by working collaboratively; that we can take advantage of new technological opportunities and share the knowledge and skills of some to benefit all, so that we can deliver more of what our customers and users want within our funding constraints. - ANDERSON, Anne - 1 -

2 Table of contents Building shared services more bang for your buck1 Introduction... 3 Acknowledgement...3 Summary...3 Consortia visited... 3 Colorado Digital Library (CDP)...4 Bibliographical Center for Research (BCR)...4 Co-alliance...4 The Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK)...4 Online Computer Library Center (OCLC)...5 The Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA)...5 The Southeastern Library Network (Solinet)...5 Network of Alabama Academic Libraries (NAAL)...6 Georgia Library Learning Online (GALILEO)...6 European Library...6 FinELib the National Electronic library...6 Business models... 7 Scale and coverage...7 Funding...7 Governance...8 Range of activities and services...9 Benefits Resource sharing...11 Collaboration...11 Challenges Funding...12 Digital licensing...13 Sustainability...13 Opportunities for NZ libraries Governance...14 Resource sharing...15 Research and development...15 Training and support...16 Marketing...16 Conclusion ANDERSON, Anne - 2 -

3 Introduction I was awarded the Edith Jessie Carnell Travelling Scholarship at the LIANZA Conference 2006 with the purpose of looking at a range of library consortia and collaborative organisations to explore why they chose the models they use, how they are managed and governed and to identify the costs, the benefits and the drawbacks and their sustainability over time. From this I hoped to draw some conclusion as to what might work for us in New Zealand, what we might do additionally and what we could consider doing differently. Acknowledgement I would like to first thank LIANZA for the award and financial support that enabled me to visit a range of consortia in the U.S. and Europe. I wish also to thank National Library of New Zealand for further supporting me. I particularly want to thank all the people I visited and spoke to across all the consortia I visited. They were all unfailingly gracious, generous with their time and thoughtful in their responses to my questions. The great benefit of a travel study tour like this is that I got so much more from the face to face interaction than I think I would have got by merely sending a list of questions. Not only was there more interaction when focusing just on the business questions being asked, but further insights were gained through the social interactions - lunches, dinners, even travelling in cars with hosts. I would like to thank all my hosts and their teams and colleagues for the warmth of their welcome, and to apologise in advance for any errors of understanding on my part that they may find in this report. I need also to note that, although currently employed by the National Library of New Zealand my study was carried out as an individual LIANZA member, not as an employee of the National Library and is a personal reflection. Summary This document provides an overview of the consortia visited, discusses the range of business models and provides comment on the range of challenges and benefits that collaborative models offer. Drawing from this I have suggested some opportunities for New Zealand in developing a governance template or guidelines for the range of collaborative ventures we have, for greater resource sharing, both print and digital, for more collaborative approach to training and support, and more possibilities in areas such as research and development and marketing. Consortia visited I visited a total of eleven consortia (three in Colorado, two in Ohio, one in Virginia, two in Georgia, one in Alabama and two in Europe) and was able to attend 3 conferences or meetings of representatives from many other consortia (the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) conference in Montreal, a meeting of Virtual Library Directors who were also members of Solinet, and the Solinet Annual Membership Meeting in Atlanta). - ANDERSON, Anne - 3 -

4 Colorado Digital Library (CDP) CDP began in 1998 and developed a series of digitisation projects funded by grants and working in partnership with libraries and cultural heritage institutions. It provides expertise and best practice guidelines in both the digitisation process and in the development of databases to deliver access to this digitised content. An example of a project was the digitisation of Colorado s historic newspaper collection, which was started as a partnership between CDP, the State Library of Colorado and the State Historical Society, whereby the historical society had the microfilm from which to digitise, the state library had the hardware and software and could develop the database, while CDP raised the funds and provided the digitisation expertise. This project has since moved out of being a project and become business as usual under the auspices of the State Library. CDP collaborates with partners in ten western states, including Arizona, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah. It has now merged with BCR. Bibliographical Center for Research (BCR) BCR covers most of the north-western states of the U.S. with the goal of providing resource sharing throughout the library community. It is possibly the oldest consortia having started in It provides its members with access to electronic resources, bibliographic services such as OCLC and technical support for Internet based services. It has agreements with the state library agencies in Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming and covers all types of libraries in those states. Co-alliance The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries is a consortium of nine institutions representing eleven major libraries located in Colorado and Wyoming. Originally know as CARL, it started in 1974 as a means of developing shared collections for a range of academic and public libraries in Colorado, particularly for such material as expensive paper or microfilm collections, and then moved on to looking for an integrated library system in the 1980 s. CARL developed an online library system at a time when there were not commercial products available. This was then split off from the non-profit parent body to become a separate organisation and the consortia continued with its original aims, but renamed Co- Alliance. Although they provide similar services as other consortia in the provision of group purchasing of resources, their product development work sets them apart. Since developing the CARL library system, they have also developed and marketed Uncover, Prospector and Goldrush and are currently developing a digital repository. The Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK) OhioLINK is limited to Ohio State and substantially funded by the State. It covers both the state library and academic libraries and is beginning to add public libraries to the mix. It is strongly focused on shared access through the provision of a union catalogue and electronic resources and one of its key roles is to broker deals for resource purchasing. - ANDERSON, Anne - 4 -

5 Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) OCLC is worthy of a study by itself given how differently it has developed from the others. It was set up in 1967 in Ohio to look at shared collection development and management for academic libraries, but proposed using computers, not microfilm as was more common at the time. OCLC was ahead of its time. The tools to deliver this electronic union catalogue were not available so they had to build it themselves. It grew to be wider than the state of Ohio quite early because other consortia saw they needed the systems OCLC had built. OCLC licensed those other consortia to deliver the service to their own members and in some cases this was the trigger for the development of consortia. Subsequently those consortia, This meant OCLC didn t have to put a lot of resource into this level of support, and therefore has grown faster as an organisation. It has really only marketed strongly to the rest of the world in the last 10 years, probably as the Internet provided easy global access. The recent agreement signed with National Library of New Zealand to access OCLC services for all New Zealand libraries is an example of this wider development. In the last year OCLC has merged with RLG. The provision of bibliographic services provides the income that then enables the other main strand of their business, research and development, to be resourced.. The Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) VIVA is the consortium of the academic libraries in Virginia. It covers all the publicly funded academic institutions in Virginia and most of the non-profit private ones. It is largely state funded and consequently its membership is limited only to the State of Virginia. Its primary role is the procurement of electronic resources, but they also provide other services, including a very active InterLibrary Loan function throughout Virginia, coordination of the special collections for the Virginia Heritage Project, and several outreach projects. Much of the work is done by representatives of the member libraries, with only a very small central office, which is how they can keep their overheads down to less than 3.5% of total costs. The Southeastern Library Network (Solinet) Solinet was the first consortia set up to use OCLC products. It originated 38 years ago when ASERL (Association of South East Research Libraries) wanted to be able to use OCLC. Solinet was established as a consortia to subscribe to and deliver OCLC services. It has since grown to cover all types of library across 10 states, east from Louisiana and south from Virginia. It is entirely funded from member fees and has the widest range of products and services for its members of any of the consortia I visited. Not only does it provide access to discovery tools such as OCLC and licensed digital content, but it also has a strong emphasis on library education and training for the staff of the member libraries. Its strategy and vision is to support a collaborative infrastructure for all the states of the southeastern USA and it has identified 3 key roles: As a broker of services (such as OCLC) delivering economic value (cost reduction) training and support To prepare and sustain a viable workforce, particularly for people already working in libraries. This includes consulting to provide staff development programmes. As a facilitator and communicator providing the opportunity to get librarians together to network and learn from each other, and to provide frameworks for things like strategic planning focus groups. - ANDERSON, Anne - 5 -

6 Network of Alabama Academic Libraries (NAAL) Academic libraries in Alabama established a cooperative organisation to fund shared resources. As with other consortia, this started with getting records online, creating a union catalogue, then purchasing specialist resources to be shared across the members. This then moved into the purchase of electronic resources. There was a wide disparity between the resourcing and capability of the various institutions, so the focus is on delivering outcomes for all students, rather than resources for individual libraries. This made sharing easier to achieve and appears to have engendered a strong sense of ensuring the smaller institutions are enabled to keep up with the more advantaged institutions. It also means a strong emphasis on ensuring that students get easy access through fast and free interloan services. NAAL is an example of a consortium with very limited funding looking for innovative ways of delivering benefits and resources to their members. Currently they are developing low cost ways to provide a digital repository. Georgia Library Learning Online (GALILEO) GALILEO was initiated by the University System of Georgia to be a web-based virtual library, but was always intended to be for the whole state, including public, academic and school libraries, with the goal Through collaboration and resource sharing, GALILEO seeks to provide equal access to information for all Georgia citizens. European Library The European Library is owned by the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL). It began in 1987 with 9 member libraries and has grown to encompass 47 national libraries. All member states of the Council of Europe are eligible to join. Each library pays a membership fee and contributes people to the various committees and working groups. While not specifically connected with the EU, the European Library receives EU funding for specific projects, for example the work being done currently to develop the digital library. FinELib the National Electronic library FinELib is a national consortium that supports research, teaching and studying. It is a part of the Finnish national library. The consortia started when the availability of government funding coincided with the development of electronic resources. The members of the consortium are universities, polytechnics, public libraries and a large number of research institutes. FinELib manages 60 licence agreement covering a total of 273 databases, 18,000 e journals, and 273,000 e-books. This supported 6.2 million downloads and 42 million searches in ANDERSON, Anne - 6 -

7 Business models Scale and coverage The consortia I visited ranged in size from the smallest (CDP) to what is effectively a multinational (OCLC) plus every size in between. There was a reasonably common pattern though for how many of them started. They were often established to share expensive resources in print or microform; then they needed to develop some sort of shared resource discovery platform such as an integrated library system. With the advent of digital resource sets, where again the cost was too great to afford to license individually, they worked collaboratively to purchase these licenses. Examples of such consortia are CoAlliance in Colorado, OhioLINK in Ohio and Solinet in the south-eastern states of the US, which have been in existence for many years. Other newer consortia began at the e-resource licensesharing phase, such as VIVA and FinELib. CDP is an example of a tightly focused consortium with a very small office of only 2.5 staff. At one point it was managing three federal grants at once, with 57 institutions involved in just two of the grants. This required a lot of time building and maintaining relationships while also managing the projects. At the other end of the scale OCLC is the biggest consortia both in terms of reach and scale, delivering services to more than 57,000 libraries in 112 countries. Many of the consortia are limited geographically to a single state or country because of their funding, partially or fully, by state or central government. Examples of such consortia are OhioLINK in Ohio State, VIVA in Virginia, NAAL in Alabama, GALILEO in Georgia and FinELib in Finland. Others cover a range of states in the U.S. though generally they are contiguous, such as BCR covering the northwest and Solinet covering the southeast and the CoAlliance, while predominantly covering Colorado, has some members in neighbouring states. Then there are consortia covering more than one country such as the European Library, which covers all the European Union countries, and OCLC, which is global in its reach. Quite commonly libraries will belong to more than one consortium to purchase digital resources and even within the consortia I visited there are consortia within consortia. For example member libraries of both GALILEO and NAAL are also members of Solinet. Funding Some consortia are funded by member fees, for example Solinet and OCLC 1. Others, like VIVA and FinELib, and are largely funded by government or public funding of some sort, while CDP was reliant entirely on grant funding. Most appear to be funded by a combination of government funding (central government or state government) plus member contribution, such as OhioLINK, VIVA, NAAL and FinELib. Or they are funded indirectly through state funding, as in the case of BCR through the 11 member state libraries, and from that all the libraries covered under those state libraries can get the benefit. For most consortia the process has been to form a consortium and then lobby for funding. VIVA was the only one of the consortia I visited where the funding was offered by its state government in the first instance. - ANDERSON, Anne - 7 -

8 OCLC s business model is very different. While it will look for grants for specific projects, none of its operational funding comes from government sources 2. Neither is it strictly a membership fee, though libraries that access OCLC through a third party, such as consortia, often pay a fee. The user is charged for their use of services, such as downloading a record. However, OCLC is reviewing its funding structure and this may not be the model for the future. Solinet is also totally fee based with an annual fee to be a full member, or associate member, while a further 1500 libraries are affiliate members with no membership fee and no voting rights. Additionally there are fees for services, such as bibliographic services or training, database licenses, e-books and preservation programmes. Interestingly several of the consortia I visited derived at least part of their income from the return on invested funds. CoAlliance has capital as a result of the sale of the products developed earlier by the consortia (such as CARL and Uncover). Half of CoAlliance s income comes from the sale of licenses and investment interest, the other half comes from membership fees. Half of this is a standard fee for all members; the other half is based on the size or scale of business. While, on the face of it, those consortia that are funded entirely or substantially from public funding might be expected to be more secure, this is not always the case. There is still the risk of funding cuts or the issue of funding that does not increase to cover existing costs. Where initially the goal was to centrally fund access to digital resources for all, more and more seem to be dealing with a sinking lid of public funding and having to get members to pay more directly. GALILEO now gets more of its funding for digital resources directly from the individual member libraries than from centralised funding. Funding was the area of biggest difference between the American and the European consortia I visited. Members of the Conference of European National Librarians pay 1000 euros as their fee, out of which 300 euros goes to the European Library. As well, there are graduated fees with a carefully structured formula based on such elements as GDP, per capita income and staffing of the member libraries. Over and above that the European Library applies for and receives extra funding from the European Union (EU) to do projects. Sometimes these are to support libraries to catch up, for example the 10 most recent states to join the EU got funding. FinELib is also mostly funded from public money, 80% of funding is from the Ministry of Education and 20% from the University of Helsinki, while funding for additional digital resources comes from individual libraries. Neither the European library nor FinELib reported any funding constraints as yet, providing a more assured basis for continued operation than some of the American consortia that relied heavily on public funding. Governance A Board of some sort governs most of the consortia. In all the consortia I visited, or learnt about, the Board comprised a mixture of library professionals and other relevant or related professions, including university rectors or people bringing in outside expertise such as from private industry or banking. Often the Board is responsible for policy decisions and another group of library professionals make the business decisions. The consortia I visited that are entirely or primarily established to support academic libraries often come under the governance of an education related authority. OhioLINK and GALILEO both operate under the aegis of a Board of Regents. In the case of - ANDERSON, Anne - 8 -

9 OhioLINK all requests for funding have to go through the Board of Regents to get any support from the legislature and hence any funding and the consortia director reports directly to the OhioLINK Board, which is devolved from the Board of Regents. The Regents have a seat on the OhioLINK board, but ex officio. Again most of the day-to-day business is dealt with by a series of committees. CoAlliance is independent of government agencies, and is in an enviable position because of its invested capital from the sale of earlier products, which provides some level of stability. It is answerable only to its board, which is made up of nine members representing its eleven member libraries 3. Similarly FinELib has a steering group comprised of officials from the Ministry of Education, university rectors, officials from research institutions, and directors from the library sectors. Their purpose is to determine strategy, evaluate reports, annual plans and FinELib s future development developed. VIVA is a voluntary organization and its steering committee reflects the academic institutions in Virginia that it supports. It is made up of directors of libraries comprising all six of the public doctoral colleges, 3 representatives from public 4-year colleges, two from public 2-year colleges and one from the private non-profit academic institutions, plus the VIVA Director as an ex officio representative. CDP was also established as an incorporated non-profit body with a governing board comprised of representatives from all the contributing sectors, the CoAlliance, a librarian, a museum representative, and an historical society representative plus the State Librarian. BCR is a private, non-profit organisation with the state librarian from each member state on its board. The executive board of the European Library, which is elected from the members, makes the decisions. Currently representatives from UK, France, Netherlands (the host country), Estonia, Switzerland and Croatia form the executive board. Range of activities and services Library consortia deliver a range of activities and services including the provision of a union catalogue, shared licensing of digital resources, training, research and in some cases developing new products to meet the needs of their members. Almost all consortia provide shared access to digital resources and for some this is their core business of which VIVA is a good example. In , the funding for VIVA overall is 57% from state funding, 19% from private (non-profit) colleges and 24% from public institutions for additional resources they want purchased through VIVA. This or a similar mix of funding was fairly common across most of the consortia I visited in the US where the environment includes a mix of types of academic institutions. While the public/private mix is less of an issue in Europe, the pattern of some core and some sub-set content being licensed is repeated. FinELib, which also has the provision of digital resources as its core business and is largely government funded, also has a mix of collectively funded digital resources for all member libraries and some funded by subgroups to cover only a proportion of the membership 4. - ANDERSON, Anne - 9 -

10 Training as well as ongoing consulting services are part of the core services provided by CDP. CDP s mission is the development of standards and training to help institutions deliver digital content, and its funding bids are pitched delivering at both digital content and training. Key to the CDP program is the development among cultural heritage institutions of staff skills associated with digitisation, from resource selection to creation of metadata to digital imaging and preservation of digital resources. CDP developed a series of workshops that covered the range of topics required to manage a digital asset management project. Since inception more than 2000 individuals have participated in CDP workshops and seminars nationwide. Educational and consultancy services are a significant part of Solinet s business as well. Solinet is contracted to provide specific training programmes and it also provides open workshops with a schedule put out for libraries to sign up to. The training programmes cover quite a broad range of content from training to keep up with technology changes such as metadata for dummies, to preservation skills, disaster preparedness, and a whole range of basic library skills and customer skills. Currently about one third of their training is delivered over the web and they are moving towards half being delivered online. The consultancy work is seen as providing support to member libraries and is generally requested by libraries, rather than actively marketed to date. It tends to be in the areas of workflow planning, change management or library reviews. Most of the consortia I visited are offering access to commercially-provided digital resources, but the development of digital products and /or the means of storing and preserving digitised content seems to be the most common area of development at present. CoAlliance, OhioLINK, NAAL and GALILEO are all working on or providing a digital repository of some sort. Solinet has a grant from the Mellon Foundation to digitise and preserve the unique collections from the historical black colleges and universities of the south. Solinet also has a preservation programme, which is half funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The CoAlliance has developed products in partnership with CoAlliance members, who then get to use the product as part of their membership fee. Once the product is launched and operational, the product is then licensed to other libraries to gain revenue. Goldrush 5 is an example of this development process. They still retain current products they have developed because they are still a good fit for their mission and their members and I was invited to sit in on a meeting of the team that is currently developing a digital repository that impressed me in its collaborative approach. As well as being a significant provider of bibliographic services, OCLC also focuses on research. The development of WorldCat is an example of such research and thinking about the needs of the library community. Currently OCLC has a US$1.3 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to research a programme the marketing of libraries to influence voters and funders to support raising the level of funding for public libraries. OCLC sees this as research that will benefit a great many libraries and it is hoped will result in a programme, rather like a franchise programme, that can be rolled out to be used by libraries to lift their financial support. - ANDERSON, Anne

11 Benefits Resource sharing The initial goal of many consortia was resource sharing so that the customers of one library had access to, or at least knowledge of the existence of, the resources of all members of the consortia. In the case of groups of academic libraries, that often saved the individual library from having to purchase resources held by another library, or in the case of state wide consortia it meant that users of public libraries could often access resources from an academic library. As that became bedded in with union catalogues and local interloan arrangements, the development of digital resources created further opportunities for resource sharing through the collective purchase of licenses. The benefit all members of the consortia get is the provision of a collective mechanism to negotiate the licenses and a collective or group price that is likely to be less than the cost to an individual. As an example, FinELib provides centralised negotiating of licenses by experienced staff, including law graduates, and centralised invoicing. Under their contracts with vendors, FinELib requires vendors to deliver training in the use of the databases 6. FinELib also put a lot of time and effort into customer support. They have a database that is able to show libraries what their likely costs are going to be for the upcoming year, which helps those organisations budget. They also do surveys and evaluations of the service they provide. Satisfaction with the content offerings has always been high, but satisfaction with things like training and customer support have gone up a lot recently, suggesting applying resourcing to these activities is successful. Over and above that consortium members get the benefit of the collective approach to selection. FinELib for example has seven specialist groups and a public library generalist group to consider content for inclusion. I was also privileged to join a meeting of VIVA s collection development committee and observe at first hand the professional and analytical approach to determining the best resources to purchase or renew. This was a wonderful example of collaboration at work, with each committee member taking responsibility for different aspects or content. Everyone had come prepared with full data on usage, costs and benefits of specific titles and was very willing to make collegial decisions. Collaboration CoAlliance has in its introduction on its website that its driving force is cooperation, the sharing of purchasing power, material and ideas. Whether deliberately or not, the concept of sharing and working together seems to be more important than how much money its member libraries may or may not save by joining consortia. This ties back to the passion for collaborating demonstrated by most of the people I spoke to and that they described amongst their members. Many of the consortia, particularly state-wide or country-wide have a wide range of members, ranging from very well endowed universities down to small public or school libraries. Even within a consortia working just with academic libraries, this wide range exists. Examples were given of the better-funded libraries being prepared to pay proportionally more to enable the less well funded to gain access or benefits. Much of the research and development is collaborative. CoAlliance s range of products is an example where the products were developed to meet a specific need by members of that consortium, and are then able to be marketed to other libraries. CDP has as its - ANDERSON, Anne

12 primary role the development of skills and tools to enable effective digitisation and access to digitised resources. Its work often brings together resources from different organisations, where each on their own would be unable to move forward, but where the resources, skills or knowledge of each enable quite large projects to be completed and the learning from that work can then be further disseminated. Even OCLC, which could be seen as essentially an entrepreneurial business, holds member council meetings to get feedback and input into product development. In every case where I was given the opportunity to sit in on a working meeting 7, the synergy of shared knowledge and shared decision-making was very uplifting to an observer and no doubt provides support and confidence to those participating. Challenges Funding As can be seen above there are many different funding models and all have some risks. There was a session at the ICOLC conference about funding models and it is clearly an issue for many consortia, not least how to come up with a transparent and equitable funding model for member fees. Looking more broadly though, some consortia are struggling with reduced funding and others are concerned about future changes that may impact on them. From discussions with consortia staff the uncertainty of funding is the biggest issue that librarians comment on. So the means by which funding comes to consortia either direct by state funding or indirectly through individual libraries paying for services when those libraries are also vulnerable to cuts is an ongoing issue. US libraries as a whole appear to be less well supported by government (local, state or federal) than the European libraries. But within the US there was a great range in levels of support, with a north south split more apparent. Most of the consortia seemed to have been started amongst academic libraries. The north, and particularly the north-eastern states appeared to have a strong level of private academic institutions, so not surprisingly the government support was less, but the southern consortia I visited, though mostly funded initially by their home state because most of their academic institutions are public, are now struggling because that funding has been reduced and they have few other options for funding. This was particularly a feature of both NAAL and GALILEO, where the willingness to operate collectively so that those with resources help support those without was so evident. It was also where the creative spirit that devised low cost ways to deliver a service was particularly noticeable, such as a distributed form of a digital repository in Alabama and the use of open source software to develop Pines 8 in Georgia. Interestingly, while it might seem that those consortia substantially funded by central funding of some sort should be more financially secure than those reliant entirely or substantially on member fees, that may not be the case. Where consortia are funded primarily by sale of products and services, such as CoAlliance, OCLC and Solinet they seem more secure. In the case of CoAlliance they sold the initial product (CARL system), but continue to produce and market further products. In the case of OCLC they licensed their products and still retain ownership, earning income through transaction fees. Solinet is a little more vulnerable in not having its own product to sell, in that, while they don t have the costs of product development, they are vulnerable to the business decisions made by those producers. Faced with reducing margins on core regular income, which may have helped - ANDERSON, Anne

13 subsidise other services to some degree, Solinet may need to increase the cost of the more discretionary or episodic services, such as training, for full cost recovery. However Solinet has been very successful in brokering the products of others and selling their own services and possibly more than any of the other consortia I visited, delivers a one-stopshop in providing a broad range of support to their member libraries. Providing a fee based service can help grow the service because of the direct correlation between successful delivery and income, but it does require a balancing act between keeping the consortia financially viable and keeping the cost down to a level that the members can afford. Digital licensing While digital licensing has been the purpose for setting up many consortia, the complexity of managing a wide range of licenses, with many being for only a subset of the consortia members, has the potential to turn the consortia into a brokering business. There may be no real collaborative input and no infrastructure base; the consortia could become just the middleman between the vendor and the individual library. The staffing required to review, select, negotiate and manage those licenses, plus the billing for each institution when each are buying into different products can be quite a substantial overhead. The consortia I visited generally kept those costs down by contributing input from members, but still had from three to ten staff dedicated to the digital licensing activity. It also became apparent when attending the ICOLC conference, that much of the focus was on the strategies and tools to work with vendors to negotiate and manage licenses and much of the concern came from the ramping up of fees for licenses by the vendors, to the point that some consortia were having to cut back on the titles licensed. Sustainability CDP was an example of a consortium for which the future had been uncertain. While the work it was doing was project based and therefore each project needed its own funding, the issue was that time had to be spent preparing grant proposals with no certainty of success. There was no funding or infrastructure to support such activity, all activities that were funded related specifically to the projects. CDP has moved home several times in its short life, generally being housed in a library or another consortia. It has finally got what appears to be a permanent home, with BCR, where its overheads are being covered and it can continue to work on securing federal grant funding for more projects. This looks as though it will work because there is a level of symbiosis. BCR was looking at starting to provide digitisation support for its members and gets that through CDP, in exchange for providing a home and support. While this is probably a case that is peculiar to the United States where grant funding is a commonly used source of funding, nonetheless it points up an issue around how marginal a consortium s survival can be without reasonably secure ongoing funding of some sort. A question arose for me around the long-term sustainability of consortia dealing solely with licensing digital resources. A tension may be set up when there is a wide range of different types of libraries with differing levels of financial support within consortia. Including all of state (or country) in one deal initially helps the small libraries, so long as the product is general enough. Once a consortium is considering specialised research papers for example, inevitably the license agreement will be attractive to only a subset of the consortia. The more licenses that cover only small numbers of consortium members, the greater the overheads and the smaller the financial benefits become. Paradoxically the - ANDERSON, Anne

14 price differential between all consortium members being included and only some members may not be great, when the negotiating of licenses may not have a direct correlation between numbers accessing and cost. Another sustainability issue that some consortia reported was the lack of predictability in the cost increase for licenses. There were reports of licenses increasing substantially from one year to the next, with no obvious reason for such a change. This adds obvious difficulties for the ongoing sustainability of consortia. Several of the consortia, both in the US and in Europe referred to some member libraries querying the value for money of being consortium members. This is probably a response both to funding drying up and the introduction of more of the corporate business values becoming more prevalent, particularly in the academic sector. While much of the value can be measured in the provision of tangible services, such as digital resource licenses and access to OCLC services it is harder to quantify the value of networking, mentoring or industrial intelligence. The European Library is looking at setting up key performance indicators in response to such queries. For some, growth may be an option to increase the chances of sustainability. OCLC is an example of swift early growth being parlayed eventually into world leadership. So where some consortia have diversified to enable their sustainability, but stayed largely within their membership boundaries, OCLC has moved from its initial purpose to support collection sharing among academic libraries in Ohio to being the single biggest player worldwide in the provision of bibliographic services. Many of the consortia in the U.S. only support the needs of academic libraries, so there is potential for some to expand to cover the wider library sector. However funding is the limiting factor to this because the academic sector has often been the source of investment. Some consortia have already expanded to include school or public libraries, but others have the potential still to grow in that direction. OhioLINK is one example where some resources are already available to all Ohio libraries, not just academic libraries. FinELib also has potential to expand membership to include industry and business libraries that could be considered for inclusion. In each case expansion may be limited by other factors. For example the funding arrangements may not permit expansion to cover the private sector, or license agreements may not allow business or industry organisations to participate, or even the lack of homogeneity across members may mean it is not cost-effective to expand. Opportunities for NZ libraries New Zealand libraries certainly operate collectively in many spheres and to some extent perhaps we think nationally or even regionally without needing to establish consortia, but I believe we can do more and sometimes do it differently. Governance A governance structure is a necessary overhead, but one that should be delivered as costeffectively as possible. It seems that each collaborative product or service developed by New Zealand libraries has its own governance arrangement. This generally seems to require the development of a stand-alone governance structure and business agreements. - ANDERSON, Anne

15 Reducing the numbers of different governance arrangements, perhaps either by developing a single governance template that all can use or by establishing guidelines, may help to contain costs while still ensuring good governance. Resource sharing The concept of the haves supporting the have nots is not just a philosophical viewpoint. It has a practical application in that the more we can get all libraries moving forward together with the same opportunities, the more cohesive a body we will be and there is power and sustainability in that cohesion. One consortia director said that the challenge is to keep all the players onside to get agreement to all pay collectively and not having the big players feel they are not getting enough benefit. We already provide resource sharing through the provision of the NUC and that is starting to be enhanced through working with OCLC. This is one area where I think we are providing as much as any other consortia or collaborative group. There is room for development with federated searching or cross database searching, but that is currently being planned. However one area where I don t believe we have made much progress in resource sharing is the provision of a collaborative approach to the retention of last copies of physical items. I know it has been mooted on numerous occasions and perhaps its time is yet to come, but that will require a high degree of collaboration. We do have a national consortium for purchasing electronic resources (EPIC) and there are a number of smaller groupings purchasing collectively for their own specialised needs. EPIC differs from many of the consortia I visited by being intended from the outset for all New Zealanders, not just a sector, and also differs from many in being almost entirely selffunded by the membership. To date it has remained a simple model providing access to general resources purchased on a national level. Most of the overseas consortia are operating much more complex processes whereby they broker deals that only a proportion of their members might want. I understand that now that EPIC has base packages in place the intention is to expand its role to enable the collaborative purchasing of specialised content for segments of the library market 9. Research and development We do some excellent work in collaborative research and development with products such as Matapihi, services such as AnyQuestions and collaborative indexing with FindNZArticles, but there is room for more such collaborative work. Being a member of a collaborative working group provides benefits back to the parent library as it enables upskilling as well as delivering the product or service. The European Library requires a defined manpower contribution as well as a financial contribution in its collaborative work as does the AnyQuestions consortium in the New Zealand environment. That could be an interesting concept for us to consider more widely. Perhaps in the initial planning for new projects, products or services when questions are being asked about the benefit to the organisation concerned, questions could also be asked as to whether this might be something that other libraries are thinking about and whether ideas, knowledge or expertise from other libraries might profitably be brought into the planning and developing. That way not only might we end up with a product better attuned to a wider library community, but there may also be a stronger sense of commitment to and satisfaction in the outcome. There is of course a cost in widening the - ANDERSON, Anne

16 input and it will not always be the answer, but it would be good if the question was at least asked. Training and support EPIC has a focus on training and capability to enable libraries to get the full benefits of their investment in digital resources and LIANZA is playing a more active role as training facilitator, both examples of targeted training across the library community. However this is one area where I think there is room for a lot of growth, particularly as we move towards professional registration and a more general need to be constantly up-skilling to stay abreast of an ever-changing environment. We could look at Solinet s model for pointers, particularly the options for distance learning. New Zealand libraries do take advantage of web-training offered from overseas and there are individual training providers offering library focused training, but I am not aware that any body or group actively canvasses the training needs across the library spectrum in New Zealand and then delivers tailored training as Solinet does. There would surely be cost efficiencies in doing so. While I know of one model in Canterbury, I am not aware that we do much in the way of a programme for staff exchanges or secondments between libraries, which can be another way of adding to professional development and learning. Nor am I aware that we do a lot in the way of having a pool of specialists or consultants who can be called on for particular projects, which can be another way of up-skilling as people working in unfamiliar territory could have the benefit of expert assistance and support. Again Solinet was an example of a consortium trying to support its members in this way, particularly in the areas of work redesign and change management, which I believe may be the same areas of demand in New Zealand. Marketing I was particularly interested in the research OCLC is currently doing in the area of marketing and seeing libraries as a form of franchise. Metronet has been doing some good work in this area on behalf of all public libraries, notably the series of television advertisements in the last year or so, but I think there could be huge potential for national collaboration in developing the concept of marketing New Zealand libraries using the franchising model and piggybacking off the outcome of the OCLC research. Conclusion The more I saw of the consortia I visited, the more I felt cost savings in purchases while definitely beneficial, may end up being the least important of the benefits to be gained. If the only glue holding consortia together is the buying club aspect and, if those savings shrink, as they seem to be doing at present particularly in the US, then they may not be sustainable. Probably the most powerful benefit of consortia though is the impact of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. Wherever I went on my visits to consortia the belief in the value of collaboration was immediately apparent and probably one of the greatest assets of each consortia. - ANDERSON, Anne

17 Endnotes 1 95% of OCLC s funding comes from the sale of products and services. 2 However it does get taxation relief. OCLC in the US is not for profit (501C3 coding for tax purposes). As for all not for profit organisations in the United States, OCLC does not pay tax on revenue or property tax for buildings or land. 3 One board member represents three libraries. 4 A minimum of four organisations wanting to purchase is required before FinELib will take responsibility for negotiating and supporting a license. 5 Gold Rush is an electronic resource management system developed by the Colorado Alliance of Research libraries to help libraries manage subscriptions to electronic resources. 6 A total of around training sessions per year in Finland, which might be delivered by the vendor or by FinELib s training team. 7 These ranged from a product development meeting to a collection development meeting to a virtual libraries meeting to exchange information and ideas and discuss strategies. 8 Pines is a programme of the Georgia Public Library Service which creates a state-wide borderless library 9 EPIC July 2007 Newsletter, - ANDERSON, Anne