 All right. Hello, everyone. Hi, some enthusiasm. We're back in person. This is amazing. So, hi, everyone. My name is Todd Carpenter. I'm the Executive Director of NISO, the National Information Standards Organization. We are going to be spending the next 40-ish minutes talking about a developing idea for a project. This hasn't been formally launched as a NISO initiative. We've been spending roughly the last two years in conversations with a large number of people, and we're just at the moment trying to get momentum and interest around this idea and this project. So, we are looking at collaborative collections and how do we develop a project that enhances the sharing of collections across institutions. So, joining me is Sebastian Hemmer, who is Founder and CEO of INDEX Data. Boa's Net of Menace at Lehigh University. And Cornelia Tchenchev, who is Dean at the University of Pittsburgh, is also going to be not even virtually joining us, but she did provide some written remarks, which Boa is going to be sharing with you all. So, libraries have sought for a very long time to collaborate on collections sharing, interlibrary loan. There's a variety of initiatives that have taken place to share the collections that institutions have. The part of the problem is that we lack an infrastructure to do this kind of resource sharing at scale across multiple institutions, such that we're not simply exchanging items, loaning things from one institution to another, but how do we get institutions to deeply collaborate on building shared collections, circulating shared collections, and analyzing what we have, what we need to serve our patrons, and do it efficiently and effectively across institutions. To draw something of an analogy with a very imperfect analogy, say my own local public library network has 28 branches, those branches don't individually buy collections, they all as a group buy collections, and they share them. There is one single circulation system that runs across all of the branches. Collections decisions are based on how many copies of the Hunger Games are needed across the entire network. Now, this is an imperfect analogy in what we're thinking is we want to have many different types of institutions working in that sort of collective collaborative environment. We don't want to have everyone running the same infrastructure system, not everyone is going to be purchasing the same ILS system. How do we get those institutions working together, and how do we build a social infrastructure to support those decision-making processes, etc. There have been a number of pilots and attempts at working together in this collaborative way. The Big Ten Academic Alliance, there's RECAP, Hathi Trust, if you think about it, is sort of this shared collection. The Too Cool Initiative between Cornell and Columbia is another example. East Boston Library Consortium has a similar kind of collaborative collections development project across the entire institution. How do we scale this? How do we make this something that every institution, every network, every community can put into place, regardless of the technology stack that they're using? And how do we get agreement about some of the best practices for working some of these things forward at scale? So, Boaz came up with the idea of the Avengers. When we started this conversation about 2020, we had representatives from about 25 institutions who've been involved in some of these conversations over the years, and how do we kind of push this idea forward? So, over those two years, we had conversations about scope in terms of development needs. We talked about personas who are involved in this process. We surveyed the landscape in terms of some of the projects that have been underway, and what could we learn from them? And that's where we get to this point, which is we submitted a grant last week for funding this through the IMLS National Leadership Grants Program. We have a partnership of 31 institutions. A number of consortium have signed on board for this project, the Greater Western Library Alliance, CRL, Colorado Alliance, CARL, the Big Ten, Academic Alliance, the Canadian Research and Knowledge Network, Orbis Cascade. A number of large consortium are interested in this. A number of content providers, Duke University Press, JSTOR, Project Muse, are interested in this as well. Some technology providers, Paratex, Index Data, as well as a number of individual institutions have signed on board, Cornell, Columbia, Hopkins, Tulane, Rutgers, NYU, Duke, Pittsburgh. And we've pulled together this large group to see where we can take this. What we're trying to do is create a middleware infrastructure that can communicate holdings information, circulation information, acquisitions information, and share that across institutions, regardless of the ILS stack that the institution is using. But we also want to focus a lot, probably primarily, on the social infrastructure of the decision-making. How do we get institutions to share, this is how we're going to collect, and how are we going to share these materials across institutions in a collaborative way? So, I'm going to pass it over to Boaz. He's going to give you a little bit more from his perspective and some more ideas about where this project is headed, Boaz. Hi, everybody. So, this project is quite big. But at the same time, we can make it happen. I think this is what Todd just said. There are so many organizations that are interested in improvement, getting to a better place where right now we are, and there are so many challenges to building a thing like this, but there are many more challenges to actually collaborate and do collaborative collection development. It's very hard. So, at this point, and I think you know as much as I do, there is no infrastructure. So, no best practices, no tool, no even a way to facilitate communication. I think one of the presenters yesterday talked about we use all those new tools now to communicate remotely, but where is it going to be? That stuff that we tell each other, you know? So, we use at Lea's Slack and Gira, and you know the great, but you know we want to make sure that the data about our collaborative ventures is somewhere and it's registered. There are lots of attempts, you know, there were lots of attempts that Todd talked about, but and I've been part of those for a while, too cool just to give you an example. We hired a person together. I used to be at Cornell at the time. We hired one selector to do selection across institutions, but they had no infrastructure, so everybody that we hired had to contact shift and move between Gobi and Oasis and other Casalini, and you name it. So, when it comes to the work, it's hard to do as a selector anyway, and then when you start to think about the economy of scale, kind of moving from one institution to another, thinking about the expertise, you know, we want to hire the best people we can to actually push the envelope on our collection building, they don't have the way to do that. So, beside that there is, we do lots of retrospective analysis. We have some great tools to look back at our holdings, to look back who owns what, but we don't have a way to translate that data into daily operation. This is where it counts, you know, like we want to make sure that people across institutions can work with each other on a daily basis, and I've been part of those things as well, that high-level agreements, you know, like we decide that we're going to have a joint approval plan, or a joint selector or something. On the high level, maybe we're successful for a while, but then when it comes to the daily operation, you know, I want to order this book, is it, do we have it? Does the other library have it? Do we know enough about the partner, the other libraries that we're working with, and, you know, maybe? But quite often those people move, the knowledge that they have is deleted, disappeared, and then we need to hire somebody that is even tougher to get. So, just think about all those challenges, and we think it can be done. So, you know, those organizations, so this is not just libraries, right, as you saw. There is a tool that I was kind of happily developing at Cornell called Poof, that did some of this work. Basically, what it did was to look at the other libraries holding, and on, you know, you search ICBN, or ISSN, and you know if the other library owns something, already an improvement. So, but what is mostly important is to build trust. So, to make sure that we are aware, even if we decide not to unnecessarily collaborate deeply, but to know what is going on across our institutions is easier to do. So, if we have data, we believe that selectors and decision makers are going to do the right thing. They'll know more about resource sharing, they'll know more about interlibrary loan activities on availability, on price, then they can choose to partner or to work locally. And we think there is market value there. So, if we want to build bigger collections, more relevant collections, then we need to shift the resources from spending the money on the same, which we do all the time, to spending the money on new, unique things that we need. So, you know, beyond, you know, trying to do the infrastructure that takes a little while to build best practices, standards, and all of that, but we need to start somewhere. So, let's do that. Community ownership and community driven is very important for this project because, as you can imagine, you know, we want to make sure that the governance of like a big project like that is very library driven, and that we know where the project is going to be going. There's a lot that we would like to do. Reinvestment in diversity and inclusion collections, for example, you know, like at this point, we are reinvesting by taking some money from things we need anyway to spend it on and put it in other places because we believe that that's the right thing to do. But if we had an infrastructure like this, then we could push the envelope and actually collect more in areas of need. Another aspect of it is the diversity and diversifying of collections. So, kind of when you're thinking about who's going to be working, you know, like people in tech services, people, selectors, you know, we have people come from many different places, and you know, like you want to make sure that whatever it is is really aligned with the way they work. So, instead of it being, you know, something that we're going to be doing kind of high level here is like the infrastructure for you. The idea is to work with whoever is partnering here and to say you have your own community of practice. You are already selecting across institutions doing certain things. You're comfortable doing that in this way. So, we are going to work with you on emulating what it is that you're comfortable with and we'll figure it out by doing it, which is going to be better than us coming up with the new tool that is given to somebody to kind of, and we believe that it's a value on its own right. So, we want to facilitate the reinvestment of collection monies, and I think that makes sense, but also we want to think about the workforce and how do we reinvest that workforce across institutions in doing other things. We have a lot that we need to cover with fewer resources. So, you can think about metadata operations, for example, you know, supporting open access, open science, all the things that, you know, our catalogers would be able to do if we were able to work together on some of those things. So, I think I'm running out of time, but this is an ongoing project. If you are part of it already, awesome, thank you. If you are not, we'd love you to join. So, the IMLS piece is done, but, you know, we really, it is going to be based on the community and on you feeling comfortable with what we're doing. So, please talk with us. Thank you. Hello, everybody. It is nice to be back in person, and also a little disconcerting. So, I'm Sebastian. I am one of the co-founders of index data. We're celebrating our 28th birthday this summer, which feels like a long time. We make for background, we make software for libraries, we provide services for libraries, hosting and consulting, and so on. But, most of all, we collaborate with libraries. That's been really central to our work for all the time that we've been in operation. Over the past five, seven years, a lot of that collaboration has taken place. Some of it has taken place over decades with NISO in working to develop standards and tools in support of standards. But, over the past five, seven years, a lot of it has taken place in the context of the Folio project, the Folio library service platform that we've helped develop and project reshare and open source resource sharing platform and a library data platform. And, I want to share some ideas that have come out of that work that have informed kind of what I've brought to the table and some of the conversations about CCLP so far. But, before that, I want to dive slightly deeper into the conversations we've had about functionality and what this thing will actually do to try to put some meat on the bones. The broad vision is to support collective acquisitions, collective lifecycle management for collaboratively maintained collections. That unfolds, Todd talked about some of the work we've done unfolding personas and models of different types of stakeholders than their needs in this space. And, it's resulted in this sort of initial overview of high-level functional apex, if you will, that we think that this platform will exhibit along the way. So, part of it is library directory to enable libraries to find collaborators, to enable people within libraries to find collaborators, individual and organizational. It's an aggregation of metadata, of holding data and availability data for materials that can be purchased and materials that are held by libraries. It involves discovery tools for acquisition librarians and others to look across this data set to do analysis, to make choices. It involves a lot of communication, enabling new types of collaboration around selection processes and subsets of collections. And, it involves tools to support collaborative purchasing and negotiation. So, actually, kind of looking behind the different platforms that people might use to actually deliver us or acquire material and providing unified interfaces and unified tools to acquire materials irrespective of who the suppliers are. Those are the goals. When we look across these different functional areas, you start to realize that a ton of it is about data. It's about getting a lot of diverse types of data into one place and enabling people to build business logic and functionality and user experiences on top of that data. But before you can do anything else, there's an ecosystem of data out there that we need access to. So, some of that data is already being aggregated by different projects and we want to lean into those and collaborate with those projects. Things like CC Plus for aggregating counter data, Gold Rush, different types of platforms for different types of data. Other types of data sits today inside of silos, inside of proprietary platforms owned by vendors, and there may be negotiation or nudging that needs to take place. There may be a code that has to be written to map data out of closed systems and into some open representation. There may be work to be done standardizing exchange formats and data models and advocating for more of this data to be freely portable between platforms. So there's a huge part of this project that involves trying to look at this ecosystem of library data that's needed to support collaborative collection management and trying to make sure that that data is freely available and portable. So that's really central. So, I want to talk next about a couple of ideas that have informed how we've talked about the technology that we want to build and how we want to govern that technology together. Again, these are notions that have come out of, in my case, in my work on folio and project reshare, and really a different way to think about collaboration around software and the role of open source software. Open source software has been around for a very, very long time. It's been a stable of academic collaboration for decades. I came to it back around 35 years ago when I was studying computer science. It took some years before it became part of the conversation around library automation that really kind of began in the early 2000s from my perspective. And since then, we've kind of come to a place where lots of people depend on one or more open source tools and people engage in these projects. But it feels to me that there are some nuances in terms of how we talk about open source software that goes beyond just saying, hey, what are the risk factors? Is there somebody to sue if it doesn't work? Is it actually free light beer? Is it free light kittens that you have to feed for the rest of your life? I want to talk about open source, kind of the next step beyond that and thinking about open source as an enabler of a different type of collaboration. So, the first thing I want to talk about is the notion of open platforms. So, platforms is a hideously overused term that is used to describe just about anything. But there's been, the whole marketplace within libraries and outside of libraries over the past 20 years has been kind of characterized by a little bit of a gold rush or a land grab where the platform economy has become synonymous with trying to grab the most users and the most content into your platform and then profit from that. And everybody else is a tenant essentially on your platform and they live to serve you with as the platform owner with your data, your behavior, your activities. We see that in Facebook. We see that in the transportation platforms in Uber. We've seen it in the consolidation of library automation platforms, which to my mind ultimately probably isn't the end goal but is part of a larger move towards consolidation and monopolization of scholarly communication. Things that are not necessarily desirable. But these types of platforms have also shown us what can be accomplished when data can flow freely between components and services within platforms. And my approach to working our approach is to working with platforms has been to be inspired by these but to then say let's reclaim them. Let's have those platforms actually belong to us as a community rather than to some commercial capital backed organization. Let's take the best elements of these platforms in terms of what you can expect expectations of services and functionality but make that part of the software that we build. So that informs how we design platforms in terms of having units of functionality be replaceable. So you have a base of technology that you can add functions to over time without having to throw everything away. It means kind of component based approaches to architecture, microservices and leveraging standards based APIs against to make things replaceable and to enable different teams to collaborate loosely. And on a wider stage I also see it as sort of increasing the level of ambition for what we can ask for this from the standards community. So let's kind of let's try to raise the bar in terms of what we require of library management systems or vendors in terms of open interfaces and ask for high levels of functionality, high degrees of interoperability between systems and look essentially at the whole network of systems as a platform be that the goal we're striving for. And the last bit before I hand back to Boas and Cornelia is the idea of managing a technology roadmap as a collaborative exercise itself. One of the things that characterized the folio project and project reshare was the idea that the community and the governance model preceded the development of technology itself. The technology was there to serve the community and it was there to serve the strategic vision and the needs of that community and in a sense the structure that we put together, the social structures that we put together to manage the life cycle of technology became more important than the technology itself. That's a really powerful way to approach technology development and in a sense that the fact that these things happen to be open source is not that important. The open sourcing of these projects are there to enable that kind of collaboration, that kind of sharing of the roadmap and the product management of the thing and that's an idea that I'd love to see unfold in this type of project too. So it means having a conversation within the project that allows place for all types of stakeholders within organizations to feel a sense of ownership and participation from strategy and leadership over subject matter experts that actually need to use the software to develop us that'll be working on it and also an opportunity for different types of organizational stakeholders to come together on the same table to make room for consortia for different types of libraries for software developers and for service providers to sit around the same table and strategize about where they think the marketplace is heading, where they think the libraries are headed and how we can meet those challenges with technology and have the technology development inform those strategies and improve them and make them better over time. That to me is the key to creating technology that doesn't just solve the problems we thought we had five years ago but actually to engage in the process of developing some technology that can respond to future needs and future challenges. So that's how I come at this and think of this and I will give it back to Boas now. Thanks guys. So imagine that Cornelia is here. Just to expand also, part of what we were working on in the last two years really was to think, Pristona, what is it that we as Deans directors are going to be interested in? What is it that catalogers may be interested in? What is it that selectors may be interested in? What is it that publishers may be interested in? What is it that system providers are going to be interested in? So Cornelia representing Pitt things and now I'm going to go to her notes. So here, and I'm sorry that I'm reading it like this. So first of all let me apologize for not being a C&I in person to participate in this panel and thank the colleagues who have generously agreed to do this panel. I'm Cornelia Tynceva and I'm the Hillman University Librarian and Director of the University Library System at University of Pittsburgh. You might have noticed that Pitt Library is one of the partners in this project and here I would like to address why. I will be speaking as a library director and hopefully address the advantages I see in a way that may interest other academic libraries to join. If you have specific questions that you like to ask me please do not hesitate to send me an email. She's saying what I will not dwell on are the things that I hope everyone is already aware of. The project embodies some of the longest held and dearest library values, resource sharing of collective collections, diversity and equity of access, interoperable standards, community on the infrastructure. To be sure it will attempt to enhance all this further and build upon past models in this respect. What I would like to focus on are the rather less lofty and yet important practical considerations and I will start with a story from the last two years that may be familiar to many of my colleagues. In the wake of the first wave of COVID many universities went into furloughs or layoffs. At Pitt we were fortunate enough that none of these came to pass. However similar to many other higher education institutions Pitt offered a retirement incentive program because of the aging workforce especially in technical services. We lost people's expertise as well as just disproportionate number of people in tech services. That two years later we're still trying to rebuild. Combine this with the fact that in general demand for collection management including and perhaps particularly electronic resources is much greater than the supply that we're generally in a job applicants rather than job provider market. For example the latest vacancy we have in tech services is because a wonderful metadata laburn was recruited as a data analyst for an AI company. Lehigh has similar pressures and you won't be surprised that perhaps the most attractive feature of the project for me is sharing people expertise. We have been talking about building collective collections for a very long time and we have had many or some successes but we've also been saying that the most valuable capital of libraries are people and their expertise. Being able to share this most valuable resource is only next logical step in our resource sharing enterprise and that's one of the main reasons why the project is attractive to me. If we were to start using a product like that tomorrow I envision us being able to partner around shared selection, shared metadata, shared acquisitions processing in policy and in any of our resource sharing networks. In case we are left with the impression that budget constraints and efficiencies are the only concern driving our commitment to the project let me quickly enumerate other features of the project that are particularly attractive. The proposed middleware is vendor neutral which translates among other things to increasing access to small presses and international publications. It will serve as a registry of collective decisions that's ensuring a more comprehensive preservation of cultural heritage. It will also contain collective usage data which hopefully will finally move us significantly toward the network collection. It is cross industry collaboration which among other things seems to me to hold the promise of a greater chance of success and finally it builds its governance structure model pre not post delivery which suggests that it has a greater chance of responding to real needs and use cases. I know that all of this can be seen as adding to the overarching concern of efficiency but I did want to make sure that I called them out separately because of the more nuanced dimensions they add. Thank you very much. Okay Todd do you want to finish? Yeah bring us home. So as we've talked about this has been an ongoing conversation for a couple years. We've spent a lot of the time in the last several months working towards pulling together the community that can advance this project. NISO as a community pushes forward a variety of projects similar to this without funding. This is going to be slightly different in that we are going to be trying to build infrastructure. We're going to try and build some software and some middleware tools which is in part why we need some funding but even without the you know IMLS grants are competitive there's no guarantee that we will get that money but within the 30 partners we've already got commitments for hundreds several hundred thousand dollars worth of development resources to advance this project even if it isn't doesn't receive the funding. Fingers crossed we will. We're also seeking funding from other sources as well. We are in the first phase of this which is to get the community interested and engaged in it through the consortia partners the individual institutions the technology partners the publishing community the vendor community as well. We will be pushing forward a new work item proposal to launch this project this year hopefully we'll also see some development resources pitched towards this project later this year as well. We'll then get into the standards process as well as the technology development process happening simultaneously as we push this project forward once it's approved. That'll include more detailed understanding of workflows more detailed understanding of the past successes and challenges that the different pilots and different initiatives in this space that have undertaken what can we learn from them. Then developing some of the wireframe models and some prototypes for the user experience and how the technology is actually going to function. It's possible that some of the vendors in this community might step up and help you know retool their their services to support this model as well. We're thinking that there should be some open source middleware tools to push the community forward but that's not necessarily a requirement. Then we will move towards an implementation phase to get the standards and technologies as well as the social infrastructure in place to support this type of library activity. Once we've got those models in place we'll certainly bring them out to the community for public feedback the way NISO processes always work get community feedback on where we're headed whether or not it works user you know kind of iterative agile development and then push this project out. This is by no means a small initiative. We're talking you know significant seven figure investment over several you know probably five or six years before we get to a place where maybe we'll see an eye in 2030 we'll be like yeah this worked but this is a very ambitious idea and it's very ambitious project. We need as many partners as we can get so if you're not involved in in the project we certainly want more institutions involved. Through the network of consortium who are participating there's hundreds probably maybe even pushing thousands of institutions that are represented through the various consortium who've already agreed to participate. So you know work through your consortial partners as well to to push this project forward and with that or happy to take any questions comments we'd love your feedback. Also if you're part of the project and you want to say something about why do you think it's good please do. I know Michael has some good ideas do you want to say something Michael? I guess I'm on the spot. Michael Levine Clark University of Denver and also I should add that representing in a way Gwilla and the Colorado Alliance because Trevor might also want to say something but Trevor and I are on the Gwilla board and and brought this idea to Gwilla. This I think has the potential to to to allow us to build collections the way we've we've been talking about building collections since since we all were in library school right the idea of a truly shared collection integrated into our workflow from the beginning right all of the collaborative collection development projects that I've been part of have been something that you do on the side and often using using tools that are on the side. So we developed Gold Rush and the Colorado Alliance as a tool to allow us to compare collections at scale but it's something that you have to do outside of the the workflow that you do for everything else. Imagine being able to all in one place make a decision about what book you're going to buy or what other item you're going to acquire knowing that another institution within your consortium has made a different decision about that item it allows you to potentially buy the print book because you know that your partner in the consortium has already acquired the e-book and so on right so so there's a tremendous amount of potential to do the things that I know we've all been talking about for a very long time but have never actually had the the systems that allow us to do it and using Colorado again as an example we've got libraries that are Alma libraries we've got libraries that are Sierra we've got one library that is is moving toward Folio we can't work together in those systems unless we have something that allows us to work together and then we're also you know Gobi and and Coots again being able to sort of pull together libraries with with different systems so I it's really exciting and and this is why University of Denver joined it and why the two consortia that I have influence in also joined and I and I really do hope that you're excited about this and want to want to join as well thank you that was a really exciting presentation I apologize in advance this question is somewhat out of left field it is what it is I'm I'm wondering if you have considered or if you can maybe speculate on potential sort of overflow benefits of a project like this and I'll just offer an example of what I'm thinking of really this is geared toward efficiencies in collection development but I'm thinking about collaborative collections through the lens of a subject librarian and I'm really deeply engaged in collections as data project with other marine science librarians who are embedded at field stations we have thousands and thousands and thousands of items in our collections that there is no way to search across in one location but if you're a researcher who wanted to look at the distribution of some animal from Washington down to San Diego you'd have to search each of our catalogs individually and I see this project as a way to enable my projects and my researchers a way to access all of that material so am I misreading the potential for that kind of activity or okay so it's not just for acquisition yeah thank you yeah no uh that's exactly what we'd like this to do so to avoid some of the overhead that selectors are facing all the time every day trying to figure out what we actually own and then to crosswalk between different systems so you know it kind of depends you know what what systems are being used and I think you know the Michael example you know like think about small libraries big libraries they're beyond you know the size at Lehigh is not obviously as big as Cornell or Columbia but we have fewer people needing to do a lot more sometimes and you know like when you just think about that and think about you know like the kind of overflow also just one other opposition possibly like I thought that you may be going there is to say we are we love high level arrangements and we are worried that there's gonna be too much detailed one-offs and then we're gonna be having you know lots of people doing a lot of collaborative work that is not in the mission uh or something like that the idea is to incorporate the high level agreements into the infrastructure because at this point you know like there's no way that you know that there is like a joint approval plan between the two libraries let's say and you don't know that it affects your decision right now to choose something so there is a gap between you know those high level arrangements and the way that they translate into daily operation and think about the community driven many of the use cases that you're talking about you know they will be driving the way that the infrastructure is going to be created so we'd like to avoid situations that are ongoing you know like every time I'm dealing with this and maybe just one more thing trust is so important you know like this is this is what's great about coming here because you know like we we do work we have another opportunity to actually connect dots between different people doing different things but there is a gap that is very familiar probably to people who do selection uh you do selection and then in the end of the day uh metadata operation preservation expensive operations that are attached to those items they are invisible they're very expensive you know we are so so kind of think if there was a way to actually make those visible on your point of decision it would be good because then you can make a call for the university if this is really an expense that is worth it and and if this is something that you know like your university librarian or your head of collections or you know there is a conversation on data and not about perceptions or you know like this is kind of why is it that we're not doing more this stuff like you know a new research direction that we would like to emphasize so that's what I want to say I just wanted to pick up as well and emphasize I really love the question because as much as we talk about efficiencies and scale overall the vision here is to lower the friction of collaboration and lower the bar of collaboration to right to make it easier for a group of libraries to collaborate not necessarily about their entire collection but not necessarily to create one single virtual collection but to create many different collections across different combinations of libraries in in different areas and with different approaches and focal points so that's definitely part of the vision I'd say so I think we are at time I think we might be a minute or two over time if anybody has any questions want to talk with us further we're around happy to engage anybody in further conversations about this thank you so much for joining us