Building Distinctive Collections through Collaborative Collecting

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

Collaborative Collection Development (CCD) sees multiple institutions making strategic decisions about who will collect what. As an oversimplified example, one institution might collect comprehensively for Central Asia, another does the same for the former Yugoslavia, and two more libraries divide metropolitan and regional Russia between themselves. Many circumstances motivate such arrangements: shrinking library budgets in the face of an ever-growing resource landscape; the high cost of storing materials; the desire for targeted collecting in certain areas to meet specific campus research priorities; the availability of expertise to catalog certain languages. CCD promotes reduced duplication between libraries and the growth of stronger distinctive collections, held locally but accessible to all. Meanwhile, increasingly efficient interlibrary loan networks, and even expanding possibilities for sharing electronic resources, mean that researchers and learners can get a book from a neighboring library almost as quickly as from their own. This roundtable will discuss both the challenges and the opportunities peculiar to collaboratively collecting SEEE resources.

Sub Unit

• Library/Information Sciences

Chair

• Brendan Nieubuurt, U of Michigan

Roundtable Members

• Thomas Francis Keenan, Princeton U

• Terri Miller, Michigan State U Libraries

• Brian Vetruba, U of Minnesota

• Juergen Michael Warmbrunn, Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe (Germany)