Perspectives on building consortia between libraries and other agencies.

ABSTRACT

This article looks at issues surrounding cooperative partnerships between different types of libraries, and between libraries and other organizations. The Ontario School Curriculum Resource (OSCR) and developments in Ontario and Canada are the focus of the article; however, it also provides perspectives on the cooperative experiences that are fundamental to many partnerships. The important benefits as well as the challenges of partnerships are considered, as is the future of cooperative resource sharing.

INTRODUCTION

It is no surprise that consortia are fast becoming a common approach to problem solving in order to seek joint solutions. Partnerships maximize funding opportunities and streamline information resources by linking technology and are often excellent vehicles for political lobbying. Costs of electronic journals and subscription databases continue to escalate, and the tangle of funding applications for small groups is a piecemeal solution at best. As fast as Internet subject lists are made, links go out of date. The "best source" is no longer static, as the mutability of information evolution makes nothing absolute or permanent. Partnerships improve productivity (shared workload) and expand funding opportunities. Public libraries, boards of education, municipalities, and postsecondary institutions are forming ad hoc and not so ad hoc alliances; joint projects, hence joint grant applications, promise bigger pieces of the funding "pie."

This discussion article looks at some of the issues surrounding cooperative partnerships. While most of the focus is on the Ontario and Canadian scene where the authors work, the perspectives on cooperative experience are fundamental to many partnerships. The contributors have been involved in a number of consortia and continue to seek new partnerships for cooperative projects; despite the hurdles, each continues to find that the benefits outweigh the challenges.

The project discussed at length in this article is one that all the contributors have worked on together: the Ontario School Curriculum Resource (OSCR). OSCR is the product of a School/Public Library Symposium held at the Mississauga Library System in December of 2002. The theme of this symposium was school and public library cooperation and resource sharing. A steering committee was formed to address the results: this group has been called simply the Library Cooperative (appropriately dubbed TLC.) TLC currently has fourteen partners from public libraries, elementary and secondary school boards, and college and university libraries.

BACKGROUND OF THE OSCR

In order to provide context for the discussions that follow, it is useful to clarify the conditions that led to the development of OSCR through the partnerships forged between several school boards, public libraries and postsecondary institutions in central and southwest Ontario.

In 1998 the Ontario Government released a new province-wide curriculum for all elementary school students; after the curriculum was implemented it was very quickly realized that a great deal of work was needed to identify necessary resources. In many cases teachers had been presented with this new curriculum only weeks before the school year commenced. Independently, educators, public librarians, parents, and students scrambled to find resources that were age appropriate and relevant for assignments.

After the 2002 symposium the TLC steering committee met; it was decided that the best course of action would be to build a provincial database to house "best source" material (that is, print items; image, sound, and video multimedia items; Web sites; and electronic sources from available onsite databases) for each major curriculum topic. It is an important point that the prototype database service would be built from the user on up. A student, teacher, parent, or librarian would be led to the resource pages through easy pull-down menus beginning with the questions "What grade are you in?" and "What subject are you working on?" and then select from common assignment lists to access resources.

The next requirement of the database was that, if OSCR was going to be relevant and practical, it needed to be housed provincially but be adaptable to the local needs of each school and library. The local library or school would have the capability to add or remove the resources displayed, and the interface would have local branding. Most importantly, OSCR would be able to jump into the local onsite library catalogs to verify availability and the location of materials. The local administration of OSCR needed to be intuitive--one should not need to be a rocket scientist to adapt the local interface. Added features of OSCR included communication vehicles such as listservs and bulletin boards for professional information sharing, links to curriculum expectations on the ministry Web site, and also sections on how to do research, how to format bibliographies, how to format footnotes, etc.

Each of the TLC members had worked previously on a number of cross-cultural, cross-institutional partnerships to develop unified information access, so each brought a wealth of experience to the table that was as diverse as it was unique. Most notably, two of the committee members had been involved with two locally designed projects for the HALton Information NETwork (HALINET).

HALINET is a consortium of libraries in the Halton Region just west of Toronto. It is an alliance representing seven information providers within the Ontario Regional Municipality of Halton: Burlington Public Library, Halton District School Board, Halton Roman Catholic School Board, Halton Hills Public Library, Milton Public Library, Oakville Public Library, and Sheridan College. The HALINET portal is a shared information network that is accessible by residents in the Halton Hills Region of Ontario with their library cards. It is an integrated information network that also searches multiple databases and houses digital projects as well as resources through library Web pages (Bell & Lewis, 1998). Other members of the committee were and continue to be involved with Ontario Digital Libraries, the Ontario Library Association, and the Canadian Library Association and are active on various committee projects that all contributed to the vision that became OSCR.

During 9004 and 2005…