Collaborating to Shape New Information Services

portal: Libraries and the Academy has as its mission to address library and information services in a campus-wide context, focusing on librarians’ engagement with learning services, joint technology initiatives, cross-disciplinary and cross-functional research, faculty partnerships, and scholarly publishing and public policy. But encouraging research that results from innovative collaborations or that shows the integrative potential of libraries with other campus units has been challenging, as was described in an earlier portal editorial.¹ Fostering writing that brings together authors from different disciplines or academic functions, however, derives directly from the shared thinking and leadership that goes into creating a campus project or organization. At every turn, we talk about needing such projects to reshape our universities to meet pedagogical demands and resource challenges, but it is still surprisingly difficult to bring such initiatives to fruition in an ongoing way. How can we incentivize sustainable innovation within our existing traditional academic environments?

In 2016, three separate national, invitational gatherings highlighted and sought to expand campus and scholarly collaborations on new models of information services that can advance research and teaching in today’s interdisciplinary and multi-institutional contexts. The meetings had distinctive emphases—museums, university presses, and scientific publishing—and libraries had a leading role in all three. Each was an inaugural event that is expected to continue generating conferences, documentation of best practices, and sustainable projects and organizational models. The author was present at all three and offers summaries of the presentations and the issues addressed. We can gain some sense of the future directions that these communities—none a tight formal structure—might pursue, and we can actively promote wider exploration and implementation of these approaches.

Academic Art Museum and Library Summit

Fourteen teams of museum and library directors came together on January 27–29, 2016, for this event hosted by the University of Miami, in conjunction with the Association of Research Libraries, Coalition for Networked Information, and Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Samuel H. Kress Foundation. The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has published a newsletter report that highlights several of the presentations, and a longer white paper is in preparation.² Teams had to prepare in advance for the summit by compiling examples of previous collaborations, themes of shared interest, and brief proposals for potential future work of greater intensity. On site, presentations and speakers were grouped into sessions on collaborative teaching and learning; collections sharing and exhibitions; and strategic alignments and institutional priorities. Specific discussions convened around topics such as shared staffing; digital humanities; digital infrastructure and preservation; and laboratories for learning, which suggested creative uses of facilities and curricular integration. Throughout, participants candidly examined the challenges faced in designing and achieving such diverse collaborations, including budget, governance, discrepancies in expertise, incompatible technical infrastructure, inadequate space, and staff expectations. The mood of the summit was energetic and productive, and there was a great sense of the achievability of more venturesome collaborative models. Most of the teams already had relationships that went well beyond simply lending library items to a museum exhibition, or using museum expertise to help stage library displays; and there were several examples of shared spaces or merged organizations. New ways to expand student, faculty, and community engagement were explored by all participants. In July, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation issued a call for expressions of interest from the library/museum teams to submit proposals for shared, sustainable initiatives.

Publishers Reporting to Libraries (P2L) Summit

This meeting was patterned directly on the museum/library summit and built on a more established cohort of university presses that report to or are merged with their campus libraries. Hosted by Temple University in Philadelphia on May 9–10, 2016, this summit also was developed in conjunction with the Association of Research Libraries and the Coalition for Networked Information, with funding support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and extensive planning led by the Association of American University Presses (AAUP).³ Teams attended from 33 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada along with representatives from the Library...