Shared Storage: Financial Models & Possibilities for Collaboration in Collection Development
Symposium on Sustainable Models for Print Storage in the 21 st Century
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA
October 2, 2014
Panel Remarks of Thomas H. Teper
The organizations that many of us serve do not exist for their own sake, and most were not
created to be shrines to our shared cultural heritage. That is happenstance. They are libraries or
archives because they can provide constituent populations with sets of services. These
constituent populations do occasionally get vocal if we are not meeting their expectations, or if
we fail to provide them with the resources needed to complete their work. In many respects,
access to the collections that we manage collectively are the largest service that we offer to our
local constituents.
The recently completed Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey conducted at the University of Illinois (2012)
confirms this by noting that our library is, in fact, valued most significantly by our faculty as a
provider of access. At Illinois, the faculty take pride in our collections and are very loyal to the
Library as an entity that provides services that help them to be successful. The Ithaka S+R
Faculty Survey noted that 93% of the campus’ responding faculty (compared to 80% of a
comparable national survey) indicated that they valued the Library’s role as a “buyer.” As a
buyer of, repository for, or gateway to content, the Library ranked above national averages by
13%, 16%, and 10%. Our faculty members value those services; indeed, the local survey
indicated that 74% of Illinois faculty (compared to 56% of the national average) viewed the
facilitation of access as the primary responsibility of the Library. We are not, however, just a
warehouse of books and gateway to bytes. We are an enterprise that provides our constituents
with services. And, decisions that may change those services are weighed against the principal
of not diminishing those currently offered. The caveat to that, however, is that the services that
we offer at our library (and I’m sure many of yours) are not pure implementations. They are
often locally manipulated ecosystems in which the specific combination of many parts result in
a whole that best meets local needs.
If we take a moment to step away from local needs, we can look at the larger ecosystem in
which we find ourselves and explore some data that should inform conversations about both
shared print management and cooperative collection development efforts.
First, we need to acknowledge that research libraries have a history of over-buying for local
(and even regional) needs. In recent years, Edward T. O’Neill and Julie A. Gammon’s paper,
“Building Collections Cooperatively: Analysis of Collection Use in the OhioLINK Library
Consortium,” demonstrated that statewide networks of libraries acquired many monographic
titles at levels in excess of what was necessary to serve their user populations. While multiple
holdings benefitted users in some cases, aggregated usage across the entire network indicated
that significant bodies of material did not require duplicate holdings to serve a network as
broad as the OhioLINK membership.i Lynn Wiley, Tina Chrzastowski, and Stephanie Baker
applied the same model to an analysis of the I-Share network in Illinois in 2011, receiving
results that underscored many of O’Neill and Gammon’s results.ii These studies point to two
things:

There is a middle ground in our acquisition patterns on a state-wide level that is
unnecessarily redundant.

The long tail of our holdings – infrequently used and not needed for regular on-site
reference-type consultation – could effectively meet most needs across a state if
resource-sharing networks exist to facilitate access.
There are immediate costs to this sort of over-buying. In Illinois, we estimated that this
unnecessary duplication of monograph materials cost institutions in the state over $11,000,000
in five years. There are also longer-term costs from managing these collections that we should
seek to avoid. Such duplication results in excess building costs, storage costs, and processing
costs when we seek to divest ourselves of those resources.
The second thing that we should acknowledge is that resource sharing for scarcely held
resources benefits broad communities beyond our region. Regardless of how we choose to
manage the collections in question, we know that discovery and service layers that facilitate
access lead to greater use. In their forthcoming paper, Lenkart, Teper, Thacker, and Witt
demonstrate that Less Commonly Taught Language materials (as identified by the National
Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages: http://www.ncolctl.org/) from UIUC’s collection
are distributed far and wide through traditional lending networks.iii Even when we removed
loans to other institutions in Illinois in order to eliminate the in-state bias created by I-Share
(the 70+ institution direct borrowing network that Illinois implemented in the 1980s),
institutions in the Midwest borrowed nearly 40% of the total number of LCTL materials that we
lent over a five year period. The next highest borrower of LCTL materials was the Southern US,
which accounted for nearly 24% of the LCTL items. The North Eastern US borrowed nearly 20%,
and Western United States borrowed almost 17% of the LCTL language materials.
The third thing that I would like for us to consider are shared services and how they can
influence collection development and management. In this realm, Illinois has a long history of
applied experimentation. Decades ago, Illinois embarked on two experiments. First, we
implemented on an aggressive accessibility model married with the I-Share network
implementation – lending anything appropriate to just about anyone for minimal cost – and
promoting a campus-wide mail option for faculty and graduate students.
Research has demonstrated that within lending networks the size of Ohio and Illinois, there is a
relatively thin margin of items that require duplication. And, research in progress at Illinois has
demonstrated that collection usage for Less Commonly Taught Language Materials (LCTL)
coupled with a strong outwardly focused service arm can be an effective way of serving
scholars at a distance. If we believe that we can minimize duplication in networks and still serve
our constituents (which I would be inclined to think is possible based on reports from the
community of South Asian specialists, 2CUL, and others), we have other opportunities to
experiment – to collect more deeply across the networked community, to earmark collective
resources to the digitization of specialized materials, and to focus more attention on building
the services necessary to help our users connect with the materials that we have.
This brings me another experiment. Over forty years ago, Illinois began building the Slavic
Reference Service with Title VIII funding. It was envisioned as a mechanism to help scholars
locate needed, hard to locate items. It has been wildly successful in helping Slavicists locate
needed materials, so successful in fact, that half of its traffic comes from off-campus and a
great deal of it comes from individuals at institutions with Slavic librarians – sometimes pointing
them to items in collections at their home institutions that no one has been able to find. This
model remains uncommon (as it should be – we don’t need to replicate this service 20 times
over), but it is also a model that could be expanded to other areas of study, providing expert
service to help students and scholars be more successful in their research. Indeed, just
yesterday, our International and Area Studies Library announced the start of “a pilot program
for in-depth online area studies consultations via Blackboard Collaborate."iv
If we acknowledge that every institution neither can nor should collect “everything”, we are left
with an interesting challenge. How do we ensure that we are collecting the right things? And,
what about the services that we offer? Are they all necessary on a local level? If not, could we
create a regional corporation that could serve public and private institutions alike – through the
development of cooperative collection development and management, preservation, and
access services? Of course, if we were to imagine ourselves creating such an enterprise, we
need to recognize that it was done nearly seventy years ago when a consortium of ten research
libraries created what would evolve to become the Center for Research Libraries.
So, how do we move from “collaboration that is based less on kumbaya” and focus more on
radically reshaping what we do?v I’m thinking of collaboration that has more in common with
the hard-nosed evaluation – we shouldn’t buy everything and we can’t – that led to the Center
for Research Libraries’ precursor? I think that we should look at the data:

Evidence from statewide networks in Ohio and Illinois demonstrate that we overacquire for our needs.

Evidence shows that we fulfill most user needs with remotely held collections of booktype materials. At institutions with Mail Options, most faculty usage of print collections
is remotely served even on a local campus. If we aggressively cooperate across multiple
campuses to reduce unnecessary duplication while redirecting collection development
resources to extend the long tail, we can collect more deeply and dedicate an increasing
percentage of our resources toward more specialized resources and services.

Evidence shows that ILL/DD networks at the state and regional level can support models
in which relatively few institutions service the bulk of the area studies collections in any
particular subject/language area. Sure, ILL is about sharing, but if we are a little more
hard-nosed about it, ILL is a cost avoidance tool.

Evidence shows – in the form of CRL and the HathiTrust – that we can establish deep
collaborations that span the public/private divide.

Evidence shows that cooperative management of journal literature is becoming the
norm. Redundant holdings of print backfiles are increasingly viewed as anachronistic.
They are being cooperatively archived and locally withdrawn. There are savings to be
realized for our institutions in cooperative management.
In the coming years, I believe that we should look for opportunities to make retention
commitments for print monographs, provide avenues for local decisions about deselection,
and, in the long-run provide avenues for the digitization and ingest of print holdings that have
otherwise eluded our reformatting efforts, whether they are identified as part of retrospective
or prospective collecting efforts. This will only benefit the broader community.
Bringing this back to collection development, I also believe that our collaborations need to
move away from being print, or collections-centric, talking points. They should focus on services
that we can deliver. We should engage in cooperative efforts to collection long-tail resources,
preserve web content, develop repositories for cooperatively storing and managing digital
content (whether digitized resources or research data), supporting programs geared at
developing community-funded digitization efforts, and programs that can assist scholars in
locating and providing access to holdings.
Most importantly, I believe that we should experiment and be comfortable with the results
being less than optimal in some cases. Last year, I attended a symposium at Indiana University
in which Peter Zhou (director of the Starr East Asian Library at Berkeley) ruminated on the
challenge of developing fair, cost effective, efficient models for collection development among
all partners when we seek broader collaboration. He noted that it was a challenge that we
should accept. I would add that, in any challenge, we should acknowledge that a successful
outcome will not necessarily mirror our preconceived image of success. But, if we commit to
supporting some experimentation and using good data to drive our decision-making, we will
achieve much more than we ever would have otherwise.
i
O’Neill, Edward T., and Julia A. Gammon. "Building collections cooperatively: analysis of collection use
in the OhioLINK library consortium." In Pushing the Edge: Explore, Engage, Extend: Proceedings of the
Fourteenth National Conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries March 12–15, 2009,
Seattle, Washington, (2009), 36-45.
ii
Wiley, Lynn, Tina E. Chrzastowski, and Stephanie Baker. "A domestic monograph collection assessment
in Illinois Academic Libraries: what are we buying and how is it used?" Interlending & Document Supply
39, no. 4 (2011): 167-175.
iii Joe Lenkart, Thomas H. Teper, Mara Thacker, and Steven W. Witt. “Measuring and Sustaining the
Impact of Less Commonly Taught Language Collections in a Research Library.” College and Research
Libraries. Accepted: April 6, 2014; Anticipated Publication Date: May 1, 2015
iv
Joe Lenkart. Email to Lib-News: “International and Area Studies Library – Pilot Program” 10/1/2014.
James G. Neal. “A New Age of Reason for Academic Libraries.” College and Research Libraries 75, no. 5
(2014): 612-615.