 Either this is madness or it is hell. So exclaims the main character in the A.A. Abbot's 1884 novel, Flatland, when he's transported out of his two-dimensional world into a world with a third dimension and so must both intellectualize and make a leap of faith in order to visualize and come to terms with a new reality. A situation not dissimilar, I think, to what universities, libraries, publishers, faculty, researchers, and our students face as we continue to move from an analog into an increasingly digital world, and is on one level an existential crisis we've been facing. Who are we? What is this world? What are we doing? Our libraries and our profession itself is operating in a new reality in which social, political, economic, and intellectual and educational structures are redefined and reshaped by technology and globalization. Libraries must be multifaceted and nimble in this fluid environment in order to most effectively meet the needs of the diversity of our user groups as a transition to a global digital knowledge economy becomes ever more pervasive. Established methods of working and learning have been eroded and continue to erode opening up new and hitherto unimagined spaces and opportunities for research libraries to have meaningful impacts on our citizens' lives. Increasingly our parent institutions are looking to existing and potential new partnerships and collaborations within and outside of the higher education sector to meet institutional missions and mandates as they relate to creating positive change for people and the planet. The manifestation of long held values of excellence, ethical and intellectual integrity, freedom of inquiry and speech, and equity, diversity and inclusion are increasingly made explicit in furthering our institution's active engagement and integration with the myriad of communities we serve or should serve. We will be called, I think in our libraries, if we haven't already been to go beyond our walls, operate outside of local and traditional environments to fully align ourselves with the vision and mission of our institutions, the life cycle of teaching, research and learning that drives the academy and the expectations of our citizens and funding bodies. So my argument this afternoon will be simply that we need to reflect more deeply on our collaborations, to seek out community in the broadest sense of the term, to work increasingly and intentionally across sectors, to open ourselves and our business practices to the advantages of meaningful and sustained partnerships and to realize that in so doing, we will be reaffirming the core values upon which our profession is based. How do we define community and a role within it? The image you see here is a visualization of sustainable community based on the work of Fritschof Capra, the Austrian born American physicist and systems theorist whose work I think has implications for how we might think of collaboration. Evolution, Capra writes, is no longer seen as a competitive struggle for existence, but rather a cooperative dance in which creativity and the constant emergence of novelty are the driving forces. So too, organizations need not be viewed as atomized, siloed and tightly managed machines. More they need to be viewed as vibrant living organisms interacting with within emergent and self-regulating and self-organizing ecosystems. The nimbleness and openness Capra challenges us to consider is, of course, not necessarily easy as it's imbued with ambiguity and paradox, the need to relinquish and share control to explore more radical forms of partnership. And so doing this will strengthen our organization's collective ability to operate in a global and digital environment, an environment that compels us to collaborate and compels our libraries to reposition themselves lest we ossify and become irrelevant to our users. So what do we do? Well, whoop, I've got, well, what do we do? There we go. We relax. This one's for you Caroline, whatever you are. We relax. We stay calm. We reflect on our values. This incidentally is my daughter who made me pay $5 for a single use. So it's a little bit concerning, but yeah. Libraries are institutions that tell us about ourselves. They tell us what we know, what we do not know, what we value, what we need. We contribute to the individual's knowledge, enjoyment and inspiration, cultural values, lifelong learning, economic prosperity and social equality. And we're so good at this. Indeed, at its best, our profession in the words of the mid-20th century American writer and university librarian at UCLA, Lawrence Clark Powell, ours is an artful craft and a crafty art, to be practiced with a trinity of talents, hands, head and heart. What better skill set is there to bring to the art of cross-sectoral collaboration? Librarians should be the world's experts in this regard. Indeed, I firmly believe that contrary to some ill-informed media narratives, and even if some of us in our profession have yet to realize it, our libraries and librarianship and particularly I think research libraries have entered a new golden age, in which as physical and virtual spaces, as organizations that can model partnership and collaboration, as individuals who have the skills and tools to navigate the digital paradigm shifts and who will be called upon as key partners with researchers, we'll have never more profound and fundamental impact on the social, intellectual and economic well-being of citizens and the vibrancy of our educational institutions and our communities. So that's all precursor to what I really came here to talk about, namely how we're beginning to frame our thinking about cross-sectoral collaboration in Canada. And I hope you'll see both in the national and provincial frameworks, as well as a couple of local examples, if you'll indulge me, how this helps to articulate the value of research libraries within the research mission of our institutions, as well as the civic and community engagement missions of our universities. And so I'm going to spend, I think, my remaining time outlining the emerging national discussion that began just around a year and a half ago with the Ottawa Declaration, as well as drawing attention to some interesting developments then in my region of British Columbia and provide a few examples of local initiatives that might inspire you to reflect broadly on the advantages of collaboration. And then if I have time, perhaps leave you with a challenge to bring forward into your own professional context. In December 2016, the Library and Archives Canada organized a two-day summit to explore the social and economic value of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums, the so-called GLAMs, to share research and to discuss ideas for further collaboration, future collaboration, innovation and partnership. There are about 300 attendees who hail from a wide variety of backgrounds, including a member of parliament, deputy ministers, CEOs, presidents, executive directors, librarians, curators, archivists, artists, writers, economists, actors, and many others. The impetus was that GLAM organizations were felt not to be significantly involved in the national conversation on the future of the culture in the digital age. The goal was to recognize our collective responsibility across sectors to make certain that the powers that be and the general public themselves understood the important critical role that GLAMs continue to play in society. Consider, for instance, that one of the most misunderstood roles of GLAM institutions is the demonstrable link between our activities and economic prosperity. The British Library estimates that for every pound of public funding it receives annually, £4.90 is generated for the UK economy. And that five-to-one ratio is similar in Canada, according to recent studies, both at the Toronto Public Library and the Ottawa Public Library. So through the discussions, presenters emphasize how collaboration can generate a multitude of serendipitous opportunities. It became quickly apparent that to foster innovation and to meet the demands of users, memory institutions can no longer go it alone. Partnership and collaboration between GLAMs as well as nontraditional partners are key and in a world that is constantly evolving, it was emphasized that GLAMs, like all public-facing institutions, should not wait for perfect circumstances. Rather, they should seize opportunities when they present themselves before change is forced upon them. The mood was best summarized by my colleague, Maureen Salah, who's the CEO of the Greater Victoria Public Library, who noted at the summit that the objective, and I quote, was not to do more with less, it's to do more with more, more partnerships, more collaborations. And from this, Guy Bertium, the librarian and archivist of Canada, proposed what has now been dubbed the Ottawa Declaration, which has provided the framework for ongoing cross-sectoral thinking and discussion. It calls for members of GLAM communities to commit to find new ways of working together to increase the visibility and impact of memory institutions in order to, I quote again, continually adapt and reinvent our institutions and promote the full value of libraries, archives, and museums to Canadians. So just over six weeks ago, a follow-up summit was held in Toronto, like the first summit with the support of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, and in collaboration with the Canadian Museums Association. And building on last year's summit, the discussion drew on four themes and a related set of questions. First, communities. How can collaborative relationships among GLAMs benefit local communities, as well as provide greater opportunities for building links and fostering community identity? Secondly, Indigenous Peoples, which is a particular discussion going on in Canada, which we'll come back to. How can GLAMs work more closely with Indigenous Peoples to renew relationships that are based on mutual understanding and respect? The private sector. How can GLAMs work with the private sector to encourage greater innovation? And, of course, government priorities. How can GLAMs advance their interests via various levels of government? The need for a supporting narrative that demonstrates the relevance and value, and the breadth of the social and economic benefits of GLAMs to these four communities emerged as a core learning from the summit. Throughout the course of this year, it's anticipated that Library and Archives Canada will continue to take a leadership role in helping to facilitate and to broaden ongoing discussions at the national level to keep focus on the importance of cross-sectoral collaboration and ideally act as a catalyst to action. Already a third summit is being planned by the Ottawa Declaration Working Group, which has also undertaken a comparative environmental scan of cultural policies of Canada, Italy, Spain, France, and the UK as a need to and to provide data for national cultural policy development in Canada. Concurrent to the developments at the national level, a year ago in March, just almost exactly a year ago, the British Columbia Museums Association, the BC Library Association, and the Archives Association of BC signed a memorandum of understanding that explicates a set of shared values and strategies to work together. Here on the slide you see representatives from the associations at the time, the Minister of Community Sport and Cultural Development in the province. This new partnership is a first among Canadian provinces and formalizes cooperation amongst the province's GLAM sector with an overarching objective to encourage member participation and activities that will enhance learning opportunities and knowledge transfer amongst professionals and institutions. This includes sharing professional expertise and knowledge to strengthen the capacity of all parties to advance their respective missions, exploring collaborative research projects, exploring public outreach opportunities to spark community engagement with knowledge and ideas, identifying joint funding ventures for projects of mutual interest and benefit in the areas of knowledge curation and public education, identifying opportunities for new membership categories within the associations to welcome allied professionals, which is an interesting development, providing member rates at the various conferences amongst the associations, and considering new awards to acknowledge and recognize and celebrate exceptional work in collaboration. Currently the MOU partners are working on what they're calling a toolkit, which is meant to be a practical assembly of models and processes and tools such as asset mapping, grant writing templates, press release templates to assist particularly small or very small GLAMs and community organizations to be able to strengthen the process of engagement and their ability to partner across sectors and with larger organizations including our research libraries. Like the Ottawa Declaration of Working Group, the MOU partners are also looking to map current cross-sexual research partnership activities and visualize those. And such mapping I think will be interesting and can reveal really a startling amount of activity and simply as a relational example, here you see a recent mapping by my university of its community engagement projects and we are quite surprised to find that we were distributed so far around the world. Sorry to those in Australia, cut off there. We are doing something there, I'm sure. I don't know, I'll have to look later. So this is all well and good, but what does cross-sectoral collaboration mean at the local level for a research library? We all, I'm sure, can think of examples. The first point I want to make, besides showing beautiful Victoria, the first point I want to make is that geography matters. Geography matters within our workplaces whose office is next to whose. For instance, in geography influences the shape of local collaboration as well, such as the knowledge quarter here in London or the Bloor Street Cultural Corridor in Toronto. Geography matters if you're situated on an island, which I hardly need to say in this room. But here I refer to Victoria, particularly on Vancouver Island, which is separated from the cultural gravitational forces of both Vancouver and Seattle, both short distances away via the waters of the Juan de Fuca Strait and hence the city, which is also the seat of provincial government, is blessed with an abundance of cultural institutions of significance, including the Royal BC Museum, the Provincial Archives, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the very highly regarded Pacific Opera Victoria, the Victoria Symphony, the University Art Collections, numerous well-established smaller museums, theatre groups and historic sites of significance to Canada's cultural heritage, as well as active and vibrant First Nations communities and not to mention, of course, the University of Victoria as well. So no, I'm afraid, no earth-shattering revelations here except to encourage you to think about your own geographies and look for the easy low-hanging fruit of cross-sectoral collaboration if you want to set yourself along this path. In the University of Victoria Libraries case, establishing a solid relationship with the local public library has been a key catalyst for both of our organizations and the development of innumerable partnerships, such as just thinking about low-hanging fruits, co-sponsored events like the one you see here on the right, which feature David Mao. Some of you may know that it was acting Librarian of Congress being interviewed by our chancellor at the University of Victoria and who's a national media personality, Sheila Rogers, on the stage of a local repertory theatre called the Belfry. So such a partnership is a simple way to access new event venues and extend the potential audiences for really all three of the organizations in this case. Digitization projects, of course, are also right for easy and creative partnerships. What you see on the left there is my colleague from Special Collections returning one of a number of 19th century police charge books and mugshot books that we digitize as part of a collaborative project between the Victoria Genealogical Society and the Victoria Police Historical Society, who knew that existed. And the library. At the completion of the project there, we gave copies of the images back to the Genealogical Society, which is crowdsourcing, indexing by their members and charge books were returned on via that historical police vehicle, which garnered a fair degree of interest and positive press coverage. And I'll just, as an aside, say that increasingly over the past six years, we in the libraries have viewed, begun to view these partnerships as key components integrated into our development and fundraising efforts, which have resulted, I believe, as a direct result of some of our collaborations and a more than doubling of both in-kind and monetary gifts to the library compared to the previous six-year period. So deeper collaboration. In 2013, UVic Libraries partnered with over a dozen community organizations to create what we call Shakespeare On-Stage, Off-Stage, a critical event that continues to have reverberations across Victoria, as it laid deeper foundations for arts and cultural collaborations in the region. The initial idea was to bring the only copy of the first and third folios in Canada, both of which are held at the University of Toronto, to Victoria to be displayed alongside the second and fourth folios, in an exhibit leading up to the Pacific Opera's hundredth performance, which was Verdi's fall staff. The initial collaboration between us and our art collections, which hosted the exhibition downtown in our city centre gallery, and the opera was built upon the libraries already established, strong relationship with the opera company, formed a couple of years before by one of those low-hanging fruit opportunities to partner around a separate event. It was also the first time, I think, in BC and possibly in Canada, at the four folios had ever been displayed together, had to convince people that anyone would come. To date, it's the highest attended exhibition that the art galleries have ever put on. The libraries then sought out additional collaborators and the event quickly caught the imagination of many, including the city council and the mayor, who were quick to join us and proclaim six weeks of Shakespeare days, leading up to the opera production. Eventually, we ended up with a multitude of partners, including local theatre groups, the Royal BC Museum, the provincial archives, the provincial legislative library, internet Shakespeare editions, which is a major digital humanities project based at UVic, local public schools where we work with teachers to create lesson plans, the craft brewery that brewed a false staff ale, faculty of course, and humanities and fine arts, the public library, and many others. These partners brought in the rate of events and learning opportunities, which really we in the libraries could never have even conceived of, and enriched programming, and what it really did was to build very strong personal relationships across a diversity of organizations that do not naturally work together. The experience helped establish a robust culture, I would say, of GLAM collaboration, one in which we now think of collaboration from the start and reach out to our colleagues across the region and across sectors continuously. It's difficult, of course, to sustain such connections over time, and so we have sought other ways to inculcate a local collaborative culture. The Vancouver Island Library Staff Conference is a key annual event that helps to foster trust and conversations across our organizations that lead to and make it easier to collaborate around projects and make partnerships. It's a one-day event initiated by UVic libraries to bring together the island's academic, public, and special libraries, and as of next year, is being extended to all of our GLAM partners across all sectors on the island. In part, that's possible because of the unexpected support, and on the right you can't see the names, but the financial support we suddenly started receiving from unions, local publishers, and bookstores, the Ministry of Education just started to flow. So it costs us very little and is only moderate effort, and it has, I think, great benefit to us. And it's based on the TRI Plus Conference, which I founded in Toronto now 13 or 14 years ago, which brings together the three major research libraries from the major institutions in Toronto for collaboration too, so worth considering. So I have the privilege to live and work on the traditional territories of the Laquungen-speaking peoples, specifically the Songhees, Esquimalt and Wasanic peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue very actively to this day. And Canada in recent years has begun to grapple more seriously with the legacy of its oftentimes devastating colonialist past through a process of what is termed truth and reconciliation with our Indigenous communities. And the Indigenous perspectives in which the concept of time is non-linear, in which the land itself is a living library, and in which knowledge is based on an oral tradition that requires attentiveness to Indigenous language revitalization are, as you can imagine, a challenge to incorporate into established research library processes and structures. Engagement requires sensitive and respectful relationship building with numerous individual communities. I think back to Kappa's conception of the complexity of community interaction and its impact on organizations. We're still early in this journey with our Indigenous brothers and sisters, but it's a process that I think we believe across research libraries in Canada, I think it's fair to say, process that will enrich the way we think about metadata, preservation, access, research data and partnership in the library and our spaces too, just to pick up on a point that was made earlier in the afternoon. It certainly led me to reflect personally more deeply over the past six years and what our partners give to us as much as what we give to our partners. At the risk of stating the obvious, our research libraries have a past, they have a present and we have a future, though I would say the three are patently not the same things. We have moved from being primarily repositories of the products of research to institutions that have a role throughout the entire research process, from creation to data management to access to preservation. Our future, I think in part, I believe will be an era of collaborative engagement in which we'll work increasingly in partnership across sectors, I think research data management for instance, to extend new and effective ways of developing, disseminating, applying and preserving knowledge for research and the public good. In being attentive to the connections between our research libraries and GLAM institutions and actively seeking opportunities for partnerships such, we open ourselves to a broad range of possibilities that leverage our strengths as well as embed us ever more firmly as institutions that play a critical, foundational and valuable role in scholarship, civic engagement and ultimately the democratic health of our countries. The architect of this wonderful library in which we gather, once commented that I quote, libraries are made of the stuff of myth. And so to every scholar, the library is a personal realm of secret topography. There are a few, if any, other institutions in our world that have such an intimate relationship with their communities and the sustained level of trust and respect of those communities as do our libraries, as our libraries have. We are unique as trusted sources of information and trusted connectors in our communities. And as such research libraries can and should be a guiding force that brings together partnerships to do more with more. In the passage from Abbott's Flatland, the response to the statement either this is madness or it is hell, is it is neither, it is knowledge. Just as in Flatland, the move from two to three dimensions brings new perspectives and an opportunity to reassess and expands one perception of reality. So too does the evolution from analog to digital. The evolution from repository to valued cross-sectoral partner provide the same opportunity for us. The passage from Flatland concludes, open your eyes once again and try to look steadily. I looked and behold, a new world. Thank you.