CCM The Plan: Purpose and Philosophy

The Plan:
Executive Summary / Need, Importance, Urgency / Purpose & Philosophy
/ General / Future Development / Appendix / Proposal Process

PURPOSE AND PHILOSOPHY

The principal purpose of this program for collaborative collections management is to enrich and strengthen the collective information resources available to the customers of the consortium libraries and to the citizens of the State of Illinois. There are several controlling principles that derive from this single purpose. These principles were validated by participants continually throughout the planning process:

Universal benefit. The activities and projects of the consortium, especially those receiving supplementary funding in part or whole, should have demonstrable benefit to a broad constituency. Though not every customer in every library should be expected to benefit from every project, potential benefit should be wide and should be available to persons and organizations outside the consortium. In part, this principle stems from the negative experience that some participant libraries had with collaborative collections projects in the past that were considered to be too specialized and to have benefits for only a few. Though such projects might be worthy in their own right, they should not be a focus for this consortium. In today's economic climate, there is plenty of scope for projects that will have wide benefit.
Open physical access. Participating libraries must guarantee that their collections will be made reasonably accessible to the primary constituents of other consortial libraries through document delivery or on-site consultation, as appropriate. In particular, an important criterion for ownership of a consortially funded item or collection should be the ability of the holding library to service that item or collection for the rest of the consortium, e.g. to lend it through document delivery or other forms when appropriate.
Contractual responsibility (safety nets). An important principle of collaboration in collections management is the acceptance by individual libraries of responsibilities for building, maintaining and servicing collections that will be available to other libraries. These "safety nets" work only if libraries take their responsibilities seriously--committing to what is possible and maintaining that commitment. Only with such contractual commitments will other consortial libraries be able to make the local collections decisions that they need to make--e.g., to reduce acquisitions in an area that another library has taken responsibility for. A critical principle of this plan, therefore, is that acceptance of collections management responsibilities is a serious matter, documented in written contracts and not subject to the vagaries of shifting budgets and policies. At the same time, contracts need to have "escape clauses"--provisions for orderly withdrawal from responsibilities under catastrophic local circumstances.
Local sufficiency. Resource sharing and collaborative collections management are not intended to replace the need for locally sufficient collections and the resources to support them. Rather they are strategies for insuring that there is an adequate collective resource for library users and for enabling individual libraries to establish local priorities with the confidence that some parts of their collections needs can be supplied by other libraries.
Selective participation; universal input and potential benefit. Though each library in the consortium should be an active participant in at least one project, it would not be feasible for each to be active in every project (by active is meant a library active in planning and/or a library designated to hold and service a collection, etc.). In fact it could be seriously counterproductive to take such an approach. At the same time, all consortial libraries need to be able to have input into the development of projects, particularly on the issue of benefit to the collective constituency of customers. Therefore, as projects and activities are being developed, information about them must be disseminated to consortial partners through ILCCM-L, the CCMP listserv.
Multiple funding modes.Funding is the area where the differences between resource sharing and self-sufficiency tend to be most striking. Expectations can range from complete external funding of collaborative projects to funding based completely on local contributions. Realistically, complete external funding is impossible in the Illinois setting. It is part of the fundamental change represented by resource sharing that participating libraries will have to provide some funding from their own budgets. In some projects, initial seed money will be provided through the CCMP, or other sources with the expectation that participating libraries will take over full funding. The key question for libraries contributing their own funds to such projects will be whether their customers will ultimately derive more potential benefit than they would if the same money were spent on locally "controlled" collections. It is the fundamental question that all libraries must ask as they move from a largely self-sufficient, acquisitions-based collections economy toward a more interdependent economy in which access takes on more and more importance.
Creative piloting. One result of the planning that has taken place to date is the realization that a grand fixed plan based on comprehensive mapping of collection strengths and weaknesses and covering all aspects of collections management is neither feasible nor desirable at this point. At this stage in the development of the consortium, there is too little information on collection strength and it would take a long time to develop such information; moreover, there are too many libraries of distinctly different missions and sizes in the consortium and, though there is comfortable agreement about the general direction of this plan, there is not yet enough consensus about specifics for a grand plan to have much meaning. The plan described below is therefore transitional: a framework in which collaborative collections management can develop flexibly through the implementation of pilot projects. It offers an opportunity to continue collaborative development without making large, irreversible decisions, and it meets the needs expressed in the planning retreats for creative approaches to planning. Such a modular approach has several advantages therefore: