Building a Culture of Collaboration

People say that librarians are collaborative by nature and I think that for the most part this is true.  We regularly and easily lend from our collections, we willingly share our expertise, and our history shows successful collaborations such as OCLC, Digital Public Library of America, and the HathiTrust, to name but a few.

Collaboration has been a major part of my career, with one or more collaborative projects being a part of almost every job.  Most of these collaborations were multi-institutional with some projects having a defined begin and end date and others starting and expected to go on indefinitely. My first major collaboration was helping put together a resource sharing consortium (MORE) in Western Wisconsin. At Macalester I helped develop a metadata standard for e-journal collections for the CLIC consortium.  In Maine I helped build a collaborative collection development model for Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin, and developed the Maine Shared Collections initiative to provide long-term stewardship of print collections across the state.  At Cal State Fullerton I helped develop a partnership with Athletics for a new initiative to provide information literacy training for student athletes.  I partnered with classroom faculty to develop a new campus wide lecture series and with campus IT to develop a Makerspace.

While libraries and library staff are collaborative, our first allegiance is to our own libraries and our own institutions. We must be careful that this allegiance does not blind us to collaborations that, in the long run, will be beneficial.

In general, while academic institutions compete against each other for students, prestige, rankings, sports; their libraries do not compete in the same way.  Sure there is some good natured comparisons and benchmarking against each other. Libraries also compete with each other in recruiting the best staff.  This non-competitive spirit allows us to collaborate in ways that our parent institutions often cannot.

Collaborations between libraries, often, but not always, start at the Dean/University Librarian level. Talks about collaboration are often aspirational (wouldn’t it be great if…) or strategic (we need to accomplish …) and or course sometime they are a mix of both. For collaboration to be effective and successful, it is important relatively early on in the discussions to get some librarians/staff with operational experience into the discussions so as to think through/ferret out potential roadblocks as well as to build support for the project.

There are a number of elements that I think are helpful in building a culture of collaboration

·        Need: Typically collaboration grows out of some need; a need identified by the library or libraries, or perhaps by the institution (s) involved. The need should be big enough that a single institution cannot solve it alone, or should not solve it alone, or it is a need that should be solved at scale.

·        Healthy sense of self:  For collaboration to get off the ground, it is critical that a potential library feel that it has something to contribute to the collaboration/partnership. This something might be money, staff, space or expertise/enthusiasm.

·        Humility: Collaborative partnerships are often uneven. Too much ego in the room doesn’t help.  If one or more libraries feel they are there to solve or fix things for others then the collaboration may not be successful.

·        Time: Collaboration takes time; usually a significant amount of time and it is critical to support the staff involved in collaborative projects by providing then the time and other resources to make the collaboration successful.

·        Trust:  Collaboration takes trust on the part of all the partners.  Building trust comes through time, and in my opinion, meeting face to face, and not just via Skype of some other technology. As a Dean/UL it is also important to trust your own staff to do the work without micromanaging the collaboration.

·        Vision/daring: While some collaborative projects may be mundane, it is important to be daring and to envision something bigger or more radical.  Jim Neal, University Librarian Emeritus from Columbia often urged “radical collaboration” as a way of moving things forward in more dramatic ways.

·        Leadership: The Dean/UL provides one level of leadership but also must allow other librarians/staff to take on leadership roles in any collaborative projects. The Dean should be involved enough to show that that the collaboration is important but hands off enough to let the staff involved do their work.

Moving forward I’m looking forward to developing more collaborative projects and a culture that supports the type of work that only can be achieved as libraries and other partners work together.