An exploratory study of collaboration in New Zealand tertiary libraries.

In New Zealand during the 1980s and into the 1990s, the public sector, including tertiary institutions and their associated libraries, was faced with decreased funding and government policies based on competitive business principles. Consequently, there were no major new collaborative initiatives other than the computerisation of the Te Puna interloan scheme. A change to a Labour government in 1999 signalled a shift from market driven policy towards a more collaborative approach to support New Zealand in becoming a knowledge society.

A knowledge society should allow information to flow smoothly to fulfil New Zealand's national goals of economic and social transformation. The Labour government's Tertiary Education Strategy, 2002-2007, focused on providing a blueprint for a collaborative tertiary system that contributed to these national goals by providing research, information access, and relevant skills for a changing society. To achieve these goals the tertiary sector has been encouraged to shift from isolation to connectedness with others.

The combination of government policy and information technology that allows for the rapid transfer of information between institutions and individuals has meant that tertiary libraries have also embraced the move to closer relationships with those around them. Although few libraries would argue that they are any more affluent than they once were 'there is evidence of a growing feeling in New Zealand libraries that partnerships or some form of collaboration are required to achieve the level of services that users are expecting.' (1) This has encouraged and reinforced the collaborative nature of New Zealand tertiary libraries which have always had an ethical commitment to sharing, in recognition that no library can be all encompassing.

Literature Review

Reasons to Collaborate

While there are many published articles dealing with library collaboration, most are of a descriptive nature explaining how resource sharing was established and why in a particular northern hemisphere locality. For example Allen and Hirshon (2) surveyed members of the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) to establish why libraries are being driven to form collaborative ventures and what possibilities cooperation presents for the future. One of the recurring reasons was the need to cut costs and be seen to be competitive to outside authorities, in times of reduced funding and increasing competition from other information providers. Changes in information access and delivery, and the rapid growth of information technology have also been cited as reasons for the formation of collaborative ventures. Libraries can now form networks to share electronic as well as physical items and negotiate joint licensing agreements that are more favourable to the libraries. Potter (3) believes that with the information explosion libraries cannot hope to house all needed information, and so collaboration acts as 'recognition of the fact that a group of libraries has a combined set of resources that is greater than the resources of a single member.' In exploring collaboration, many hope to increase the amount of information to which their patrons have access, with moves away from physical ownership to access to information in various distributed forms, such as electronic journals.

Barriers to Collaboration

Evans (4) explains there are 'seldom reports on how and why a cooperative project failed' and indicates that this lack of knowledge about past efforts is a barrier to collaborative success. What the literature does indicate as one of the main reasons for failure is the inability of libraries to cede some control. Evans (5) points to fear of decisions being made that individual libraries must agree to, and fear of budgets being directed away from core users.

 
   Few if any academic libraries would argue that collaborative demands 
   should be placed above primary users' priorities and their core 
   collection. It is difficult to develop arguments of cooperative 
   collection development success or failure when there is little 
   evidence to support either assertion due to a lack of objective 
   measurements which is part of a larger difficulty that collection 
   development has measuring its effectiveness in either qualitative 
   or quantitative terms. 

This lack of…