Please come prepared to participate

The Conference goal is to formulate an agenda for the community to begin to design and implement new strategies for cooperative collection development. Therefore, we ask that you review the conference papers beforehand, so that you will be better prepared to engage in dialogue at the Conference. The authors of the papers will only be permitted to give orally a five-minute summary of their papers at the Conference to assist you in recalling their thesis. Then, Kathryn Deiss, the Conference Facilitator, will promote a conversation between the participants and authors in hopes of expanding our understanding of the problems and the opportunities confronting us as we attempt to design and implement new strategies for cooperative collection development. We also will have Guest Speakers who will stimulate our cerebration, and, too, the special environment of Aberdeen Woods (including lots of coffee, munchies, etc.). Your contribution to this dialogue is essential and most encouraged. PLEASE COME PREPARED to help us all gain from this experience.

In order to arrive at a consensual plan of action, we have provided two breakout sessions during the Conference on Saturday and general discussion period at the end of the Conference on Sunday. This will enable participants to examine the various ideas raised by the Conference papers, Guest Speakers, and those of the participants themselves. To permit a more thorough examination of these ideas on Saturday, we will breakout into smaller, intimate groupings with appointed facilitators (chosen from the five sponsoring organizations). The groups will be randomly selected from the list of participants and you will be notified when you register at the Conference which group you will be in and who is your facilitator. Below you will find a list of potential questions to be addressed for the two Saturday breakout sessions (this in no way implies that the group cannot forge into different, but relevant, territory). The last session on Sunday will include all participants and will be facilitated by Kathryn Deiss.

Cooperative Collection Development - Topics/Questions for Breakout Sessions

Since Cooperative Collection Development is a broad topic ranging over many areas of concern, representatives of the five organizations sponsoring this Conference met beforehand in order, hopefully, to focus the discussion issues. We trust that many of the papers that will be presented online for this Conference, and the Conference presentations themselves will stir us into a consensual agenda of action.

With that in mind, we propose that the two breakout sessions on Saturday, in addition to the Conference presentations and online papers, move us toward creating an action agenda for the final session on Sunday.

For the purposes of the Conference, cooperative collection development can be explored in terms of the following four foci:

• USERS (their role, comprehension, and acceptance/education of CCD strategies)
• LIBRARIANS (their role: authentication, archiving, licensing, thinking/acting locally/globally, guidance, etc)
• TECHNOLOGY (new technologies bring new opportunities for CCD)
• CONTENT (selecting subjects and formats to optimize CCD)

Session #1: Background, Context, Problems/Opportunities

Why have libraries cooperated in the past? What are the current barriers/opportunities?

Suggested questions:

1. What are the major collection development and management issues facing North America’s Research Libraries? What could be done about them?
2. What are your attitudes about ownership, access, sharing, net-lender compensation, pooling resources, joint ownership, locating interlibrary loan materials where last delivered/used?
3. If self-sufficient libraries are an example of "micro" planning, what are the "macro" issues that cooperative groups might examine?
4. Should we be directing technology more rather than being passive recipients of the industry’s output? Modifying technology?
5. Is interlibrary loan receiving sufficient support/recognition given its centrality to "accessing" other collections and document delivery?
6. Within library administrative hierarchies, how are collection development librarians best positioned to be effective and efficient?
7. How can delivery of interlibrary loans be improved? Need materials be returned until asked for?

Session #2: Cooperative Models

What models have worked - what are the strengths/weaknesses? Centralized/decentralized?

Suggested questions:

1. Why do you think the current digital cooperative efforts of many consortia are working whereas earlier attempts to collaboratively build and share print collections ran into so many problems? What is or can be done to overcome the roadblocks that seem to be in the way of collaborative collection development in the print world?
2. Will users (faculty, students, and librarians) of our libraries accept the problems of cooperative collection development (the books are checked out to another universities’ patrons, slowness) as well as it benefits (more accessible material)? What can be done to overcome these problems?
3. Should Libraries be sharing bibliographers for mutual collection building and related collaborations, such as preservation and archiving?
4. Years ago some might have supposed shared remote storage was something that happened only in California. Yet this is becoming very common now with such facilities springing up everywhere. Is there some way to work together to facilitate shared access nationally?
5. Should there be a national print archive that serves North American Libraries? Regional? Digital Archive?
6. Many libraries and some national organizations are beginning to play a larger role in the collecting, publishing, marketing, and archiving of scholarly research (Project Muse, SPARC, etc.), what should library consortia be doing to move this agenda along?
7. What role, if any, should Libraries play in authentication of content? How should it be carried forward? Should library consortia be looking at how to improve the effectiveness of students who are mining the Internet?
8. One of the major goals of library consortia has been to reduce the per-unit cost of information through aggregated purchases. To what degree do national licensing agreements reduce competition (smaller consortia are not pushing the publisher for the best deal) and result in a new list price with the consortia co-opted by the publisher? If this is the case, how can library consortia prevent this from happening?
9. Should Libraries play a role in assisting Library and Information Schools (higher education in general) to graduate students who are better prepared to build and manage cooperative library collections? If so, what role should that be?

Session #3: Development of an Action Agenda for Cooperative Collection Development

Each group facilitator will have the option of how to engage his/her group by choosing those questions that stimulate responses or evolving questions/answers during the group’s interactions.