The Boston Library Consortium and RapidR

This chapter is intended to describe the history of collaboration between the Boston Library Consortium (BLC) and RapidILL in developing new and unmediated resource sharing products: RapidX, RapidX for All, Rapid chapter sharing and RapidR, (Rapid Returnable sharing). This narrative explains the process of testing and piloting these products as part of a consortium that has a long partnership of being forward thinking in improving resource sharing among its partner libraries. Some of this chapter describes Interlibrary Loan and consortiums in detail which is intended to provide historical perspective to the 21st century implementation of RapidR. It is hoped that the story of the BLC and RapidILL may give guidance and provide advice to other libraries and consortiums if they are in search of new ways to share library materials in a more efficient, cost effective and unmediated manner.

Collaborating Off Campus

This chapter describes how academic libraries can partner with public, school, and special libraries – despite differences in mission or size – to meet the professional development needs of librarians, support staff, administrators, trustees, and volunteers. Using Lake Superior Libraries Symposium as a model, the chapter will explore methods for initiating and sustaining an effective community of practice. By joining forces with colleagues off campus, academic library staff members can better meet the needs of increasingly technologically sophisticated students and faculty and provide the highest quality service. The chapter will provide a literature review about communities of practice and look at how librarians can establish and nurturing a productive group of library professionals. Additional examples of academic librarians' involvement in regional, homegrown library networks and organizations is included to compare and contrast with LSLS.

Online Video Tutorials and Interlibrary Resource Sharing

The advent of online video sites has made possible a new and powerful way to disseminate information: the online video tutorial. The Western New York Library Resources Council (WNYLRC), in conjunction with the University at Buffalo Libraries, developed a project that sought to explore the possibilities of this tool for librarians. In WNYLRC's Knowledge Base Tutorials On-Demand Program, tutorials were researched, scripted and produced to enhance the training of librarians and professional staff, to answer general questions, and to provide detailed information about library software and platforms. This chapter will describe the design, implementation, and outcomes of this program, as means to lay a foundation for future work in the area of video tutorials, library resource sharing and information dissemination. The ramifications of platforms such as YouTube and the new kinds of literacy that are growing as a result are essential to the future of libraries in the digital era.

Academic Library Collaborations to Strengthen Open Government Data and Expand Librarianship

In academic libraries, the area of data librarianship has introduced several new functions and skills into the librarian toolbox. These include statistical and software support, research data management, data curation, and data and statistical literacy. Fostering data-related collaborations enables librarians to enhance library services, collections, and outreach. In this chapter, we will focus on academic library collaborations with government agencies as case in point. Under the umbrella of open access, local and national governments have started making available the raw data that they collect, in the course of providing public services, for users to conduct their own analysis. This chapter will 1) describe data librarianship in academic libraries; 2) review open government data repositories; 3) outline concerns with open government data, such as metadata and data literacy; and 4) describe collaborative efforts between an academic library and New York City government agencies to address concerns with open government data.

The LOUIS Consortium and Catastrophe

Using interviews, pictures, and LOUIS-related documentation, the chapter will describe the experiences of LOUIS and LOUIS member institutions affected by the hurricanes in the context of how the consortium helped its member institutions cope, recover, and better prepare with regard to disasters. It will detail the challenges the consortium faced as a whole and the lessons learned from those experiences with a focus on its ILS, ILL, and shared library facilities. Finally, the chapter will also describe the changes the consortium made as a result of those experiences and lessons and how LOUIS plans to continue supporting its members and serving the state in the future and how it would handle future hurricanes and similar disasters.

Library Collaborative Networks Forging Scholarly Cyberinfrastructure and Radical Collaboration

Academic libraries and teaching departments sometimes treat Digital Humanities (DH) as radically new. While DH is radically new in terms of collaborative practices and methods, it is also fundamentally rooted in the humanities and intricately connected to core activities by librarians, especially for collaboration. In this chapter, we explain how the UF Smathers Libraries leveraged the library digital collections—with rich technical features and content, and a robust underlying infrastructure—to create the necessary scholarly cyberinfrastructure to then support the DH community for an environment of radical collaboration. To do so, we show how librarians leveraged the new DH opportunities to fundamentally enrich and improve existing, seemingly more traditional work, including collection development, library scholarly councils, collaboration among libraries for print and digital collections, outreach and instruction, and more.

Collaborations in Liberal Arts Colleges in Support of Digital Humanities

The field of digital humanities has been rapidly expanding over the course of the last decade. As such, academic institutions have been working to identify ways of supporting these new endeavors in a time of economic struggles. The Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi) at Hamilton College was conceived as one possible model of supporting digital humanities scholarship at a liberal arts institution. The DHi model relies heavily on collaboration among different teams in the Library and Information Technology Services across campus, and with institutions across the United States. DHi also has international partnerships that promote its goals in research, learning, and public humanities. This chapter will describe the various collaborations of DHi and offer suggestions for how others can implement similar support models at their institutions.

Collaboration between Researchers and Academic Library

Even though many academic libraries are offering various types of data management services (RDM) and infrastructure, many universities struggle with convincing researchers to publish their data. Collaboration in data management services between libraries, researchers, universities and government is the only way to make research data available and accessible. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how initiative from researchers led to wider collaboration between researchers and an academic library and resulted in the development of data management services in the library as well as a country-wide research data management consortium in Estonia. The country-wide research data management system was a requirement of the funding agency which put the library into a new position to initiate and lead work towards research universities' consortium. The development work of RDM services has tremendously raised the library's value as a partner rather than just a service provider in the eyes of researchers.

Curricular Collaborations

As libraries make the transition from information repositories to centers of learning, librarians are under pressure to collaborate more effectively with other academic units and departments. At the same time, classroom faculty feel pressure to experiment with innovative teaching methods, to provide experiential learning opportunities, to be more interdisciplinary and collaborative, and to engage their students more proactively. A 3D printing curricular collaboration between a library and an academic department is presented that illustrates the importance of collaboration and innovation, the changing mission of libraries, the learning styles of millennial students, and the benefits of experiential learning. The chapter explores in-depth both the opportunities presented by curricular collaborations and the challenges to providing technologies in a curricular context.