 Hello everybody, and thanks for clicking into this video. My name is Morris York. I'm the director of library initiatives for the Big Ten Academic Alliance. And what I'm gonna talk to you about for about 20 minutes here is the big collection. What, the how, and the why. So to dive right in, this is the map of the Big Ten Academic Alliance. The list of the 15 institutions was on the opening slide there. This is our geographic layout. It's from Nebraska in the West, over to Rutgers in the East. This is a coalition and alliance of 15 independent universities that has worked together for over 60 years in a wide range of teaching and research collaborations. The library is one very important component of that. And the big collection is a shared strategic direction among the universities to enhance the common good and the academic mission of each university. What sits at the heart of it is the library director's commitment to an interdependent future. These are the university librarians, the deans and directors of all 15 institutions, and a commitment to move the 15 independent collections of the Big Ten to be one collection, shared and fully networked. This is a commitment that was made in the fall of 2019, but it stems deeply from this history of collaboration that the BTA has. A commitment to join our strengths, create something more powerful than the sum of our parts, and articulate the needs of the whole to coordinate holistic action that elevates the collective interest and the greater good. This is the power of collaboration. It is the power of the big collection. So what is this that the big collection is building on? What is it that the Big Ten Academic Alliance has built together over these last 60 years? There are several components. One, there is our peer groups. We have a very rich network of peer groups that work across various programmatic areas, like acquisitions, cataloging, special collections, public services, interlibrary loan. The diversity, equity and inclusion peer group is our newest one. We're just starting that up. There's some 350, 400 people engaged across all of our peer groups. Then we also have our initiatives. These tend to be larger, more formal, more structured collaborations. They have funding behind them. They have goals. They tend to have targets and timelines and things of that nature. Our accessibility initiative is very well known. Our SharePrint repository has been going for almost 10 years and it's very successful. The Geoportal Initiative, which is home to out of the University of Minnesota, our cadre data platform, which is out of Indiana and most recently our transformative agreements initiative, which is a collaboration looking at our shared licensing programs and at our acquisitions of content. Along with these, we have our programs. Now these are more like ongoing infrastructure programs that are collectively supported across all of the universities. So things like our UBARO, our fulfillment network, we have shared licensing, collective licensing of content that we do together, our sustainable publishing initiative, cooperative cataloging. So this new thing called the big collection. Is this just a new initiative that we're standing up on the side, something else to work with alongside everything else? It's really more a picture of the big collection moving to the center, becoming the lead idea and the center of gravity that aligns our resources and initiatives across the Big Ten Academic Alliance library initiatives. In a very real respect, the big collection is standing on the shoulders of the 60 years of collaboration and success of building trust networks, of building deep relationships and success. So here's a quick timeline of the big collection as a concept, those of you who know me know that I never put this much text on the screen, but this is a video, so you can pause this and look at it and read it if you like. But this really goes all the way back to 1964. This was only three years after the BTA was formerly known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the CIC. Only three years after it was formed, this report was written on observations of the possibilities of instituting cooperative automated systems among CIC libraries. At that time, the libraries all taken together had a total of about 18 million volumes. Flash forward to the 1990s and the Virtual Electronic Library Initiative. This was looking at creating a joint electronic library. It had a premise of creating joint systems and things of this nature, but essentially an idea that continued this first report from 1964, looking at collaboration between the 15 member libraries. At that time, it was 58 million volumes. Then up to 2019, and this is where we really get the commitment to the big collection as a strategic direction. A very important collaborative report written with OCLC operationalizing the big collection was led by Lurkin Dempsey. We'll talk about that a little later on as well, was an incredibly important touchstone for the whole initiative. That fall of 2019, all 15 university librarians signed a commitment to an interdependent future for our 15 libraries. At that time, the total collection and where it is now is at 114 million volumes. And then in 2021, just a month ago, the action phase begins. We were sort of in a silent phase for that year studying what is this commitment? What is the nature of it? What are we talking about? And now we're really moving into that action phase, announcing the steering committee, putting the project structures in place and looking towards beginning the first pilots to really get started on creating the big collection. So what are we talking about? Let's step back and look at that big collection. Let's start with just the circulating collection of books. That's a logical place to start. It makes a lot of sense. They're tangible. We know it's much more than that. But that's a good place to start to say, what is it that we're talking about? So this is that 114 million volumes distributed over the 15 research libraries. This is 22% of the printed content in North America. And this really came out of that very important research in that report done with in partnership with OCLC. This is more than half of those volumes as that analysis shows held by only a single BTA library. So very high uniqueness in that collection. Only 6% duplicated in 10 or more libraries. So a very low rate of duplication as well. Now, what everybody knew at the time and what rapidly accelerated with the pandemic in terms of importance and urgency is that this is about far more than the books. So this was just a little map I drew to try and visualize what is the real scope of the big collection? What are its dimensions? If we drew them out as continents and we can look at the purchase collection, the license collection, physical and electronic in both of those realms, the digitized collection, the unique materials and collections that were each digitizing and making available through repositories and other means. The datasets, both those that we acquire commercially, geospatial data, government data and also the research data that we're creating uniquely and then also the published collection, especially looking towards our university presses and the unique scholarly output that's published through the means of our own creation of the scholarly record. And then we have this continent of open access and we have wonderful conversations about whether that's a continent all by itself or whether it's just part of the other continents or whether it should even be called open access. So the scope is enormous. And if we really start to think into these dimensions about what this aspiration is, what we're moving towards with the big collection, it could be almost too daunting. So we really have to have a touchstone. And where we could step back is to libraries, to the first principles. And these are the key ones that we work with. Community investment in a shared resource, egalitarian access to the tools of knowledge creation, being a provider of domain expertise to empower researchers and acting as a facilitator of interdisciplinary and cross institutional collaboration. And very importantly, being the long-term guardian and preserver of the research products of the institution. These are our touchstones. As we look at how we get started though, where we could go out and look at the landscape and look at what's been created almost to take a look at it just from a systems perspective. Is there an RFP that we could put out? Is there someone we could just ask to put this in place and just do it for us? The reality is that nothing is there that could just be pulled off the shelf and to put into place. The tools and the systems exist, but they're a kit of parts, they're not solutions. The reality is that this is not an implementation problem. It is an opportunity for artful design. We will collectively design the future that we would like to see. So rather than adopting a wholesale model of implementation or putting out a large systems initiative, we take an innovation model and put it at the heart of our approach. The innovation model is designed to produce early visible victories and balance that with building long-term capacities. We know that this is going to take a long time and it's going to take a lot of investment. We can't wait for years to see tangible results. We need to make improvements that have a direct effect on delivering value for our faculty and students right now. So the innovation model essentially takes that approach as its starting point. And what the innovation model says is, let's make small targeted investments. Let's put forward a risk, let's innovate. Out of that, we learn what works and what doesn't, consolidate those gains for what works and keep that, turn that into practices and habits. What doesn't work, we can shed that, we can toss it aside. We do get learning and insight from that, but we don't have to invest in it any longer and we can set it aside. And then we go through another cycle of risk and innovate, consolidate gains, risk and innovate consolidate gains and we begin to move in a spiral motion. What this means is that as we reach further, we deepen capacities. We reach a little further and we deepen capacities and begin to move in an iterative fashion like that towards the future. For the big collection specifically, we can pick up and start to see what this means in practice. So out of that report on operationalizing the big collection, these are three of the major pillars that are illustrated, the enterprise, shaping applications, operating on collections. So managing the enterprise, managing the flows and managing the stock. These are huge concepts. They're in certain ways a framework for how we start to think about the big collection, but it's difficult to think about how we think into that and where we get started. Now, the report does an excellent job of laying out the strategies and the frameworks for what this would look like. What I did was to sit down and say, how can we match up a framework this large with this piloting and small innovation approach? Literally started drawing on that same diagram and saying, yes, we can get started here. Here's a small investment we can make here. Here's another that we could get started on over in this region and you start to build out a little bit of a, okay, yeah, we can get started with this. We can take a prototyping, a piloting approach and start to work towards that kind of manageable investment that will start to see real results. Of course, we have to do this according to a strategy. I mean, it wouldn't make any sense at all and would be quite counterproductive. If all we ended up doing in the end was seeding a dozen or a hundred pilot projects next to each other and they were really interesting and we learned a lot, but at the end, they didn't fit together. What has to happen is all of these interoperate and join together in the future to create this much larger scaled and sustainable vision that we're trying to build out. So a strategic roadmap looks something like this. The now, soon and later working towards a desired future. Almost you could articulate that desired future and then almost work backwards to say, what's the now, soon and later of how we need to get there? And then of course, there are several activities that we're gonna need to do. So we start lining up parallel streams of activity that are working in coordination and we could put a higher purpose in front of that that joins these all together towards working for a common purpose. And then we could put a wrapper around all of this and make it into a strategic stream that can guide us as we start to move towards this future. All of the different groups that would be working together in order to create this in parallel. And the big collection spans so many areas. We almost start to see many strategic streams moving next to each other in areas of policy, in collection development, in DEI and anti-racism, in fulfillment, which is a fundamental place that we need to start, as well as cataloging and metadata discovery. There are so many others that start to work out to create this rich map of where we're headed. So this is the immediate direction, investing in the innovation and prototyping model. And the library directors committed a seed investment for the first year of startup costs toward achieving the goals of the big collection. Dollars and people that are necessary to support the costs of these pilots and get them off the ground. So this is a little bit of an overview of that project structure and what this looks like. So the library directors of the big 10 and these are the 15 library directors are the initiative sponsors. They set the vision and the direction and they hold the commitment on behalf of the whole alliance. The library directors have empowered the big collection steering committee. There are three director liaisons in that committee and then six members, leaders from among our library community across different institutions. Their role is to steward the strategic roadmap, allocate the resources towards those projects and align policies and action towards achieving the vision of the big collection. That steering committee guides and stewards the pilot projects themselves. So it's the job of the pilots to create practical projects to achieve immediate near-term goals, articulate the objectives of those pilots, steward the resources and report on the outcomes back to the big collection steering committee, which sits there as an umbrella coordinating the activity and comparing constantly back to that strategic roadmap and measuring how are we doing towards achieving the vision? Are we improving things? Have we gotten better? And are we moving in a unified direction, a coherent direction? So here essentially to touch back to that big collection as the lead idea and the center of gravity. These are the priority areas for this first year and for how we're going to move forward with the initiative. There are three important areas of activity and this is where the library directors have expressed the kind of shift that we're going to need to take to work together, to work as a collective, to think on behalf of the whole and act on behalf of the whole. So first, there is the cultural shift that needs to happen. These are the social forms. This is how we work together, how we come together, the type of work that we do together. This is who we are. The second realm is the realm of thinking and planning. So this is a strategic shift that accompanies that cultural shift. It's the second sphere of activity for the coming year and for the path forward for the big collection. The third area is in the activity itself that we do. So this is the projects that we do, that we take on. It's a shift in our intention and resources to accomplish the goals of the big collection and right there in the middle sits communication. So important for each one of these. Now, this is actually an active form. They work together, the cultural realm impacts the thinking, impacts the activity. They work on each other and weave together. They also go the other direction and each one impacting the other and changing what happens as we move forward. Communications, of course, sitting there in the center, deeply integrated with and working along with the others. So we start to work in the spiral form to match the innovation model. The point of all of this, of course, is developing a shared strategy. This is working towards a central strategy that can complement and strengthen local individual strategies. It doesn't tell any one of the members which way to go or to say, we've figured it out. If we all just move in this direction, it much more says, how can we sit in the middle and strengthen? In a systems approach, this is very important as well. So rather than all of us moving towards the same systems or towards a similar stack of technologies, it says, let's make the middleware. Let's make something in the center that can integrate with local systems, local discovery environments, local fulfillment strategies and complement those, but doesn't try to shift any of those local technology decisions. So what are we trying to do and where do we start? The concept of knowledge as a commons was deeply explored by Eleanor Ostrom, who was the only woman to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. In fact, she wrote an entire volume on knowledge as a commons. Kathleen Fitzpatrick picked up on Ostrom's ideas and applied it especially to the idea of the future of the university. And what is it that we need to collectively work towards? Kathleen did a wonderful keynote for CNI in the spring of 2019. I highly recommend going and watching that as well. To take a look at the components of what we're talking about with the knowledge commons. The first component is institutions, projects and organizations creating knowledge infrastructures on behalf of the public interest. A second component, open access to public knowledge for the public interest. This links in. And the third component, the sustainable creation and preservation of scholarly and scientific knowledge for the public interest. These three elements together form the ideal of the knowledge commons. The reality is that there are streams and a variety of threats that are working into the heart of the commons. These appear especially as for-profit and economic motives that are disrupting the balance of the commons and steering it towards private interest over the public good. Stepping back and observing this state of affairs, we could rightly ask questions such as, what gets saved? Who decides and why? Who gets to see what and on what terms? So what is it that we're doing? We are building a knowledge commons for the Big Ten Academic Alliance. And where do we get started in building the infrastructure for the commons? These are the lead areas of strategic priorities for this first year. Discovery, the total pool of resources across our 15 research libraries. Delivery, rapidly, anywhere regardless of who owns or where the item is held or in what format it happens to be in. Knowledge creation, so radically expanding the publishing opportunities available to our faculty and researchers, advancing open scholarship and relentlessly prioritizing freedom of choice above all, freedom of choice for all of our faculty and researchers on how they approach their scholarship, where they choose to publish and where they work. And finally, knowledge preservation. So importantly for research libraries, durable, scalable, open, and trustworthy knowledge preservation for the future. The big collection is what we must do. It is the action we are called to. Thank you for watching this video. To learn more, visit our website. Take care everyone and have a great day.