Over the past few years I have been talking about three systemic ways in which collections, broadly understood, are evolving in a network environment. They are: the collective collection, the facilitated collection, and the inside-out collection.

The Calgary central library was on first impression the finest public building I have been in for years.

Coordinating collective collections Collective collections are collections addressed at a level above the individual institution. I introduced our recent report

While collective collections have been much discussed, less attention has been paid to how to operationalize them in consortial settings. This post introduces work done with the BTAA to explore this challenge.

Libraries now manage facilitated collections alongside their acquired collections: these are collections assembled from the web organized around user interests.

We are now used to memory institutions as a way of collectively referring to libraries, archives and museums. We also recognize that memory is not univocal or may be contested.

Libraries are not ends in themselves, but serve the interests of the organizations of which they are a part. As university emphasis varies around research, education and career poles, we can expect to see libraries evolve to support those emphases more strongly.

When I think of the Google Books initiative now, three things stick with me. The first is simply what an

In making choices about focus and investment, consortial options can vary along three important axes: scoping, sourcing and (right)scaling.

Scaling capacity (building shared infrastructure and services) and scaling influence (aggregating a library voice to lobby or persuade) are historically core consortial activities.

Library consortia play an important role in scaling learning and innovation – this will become both more purposeful and more important in coming years.

Libraries and related organizations group together in a variety of ways to get their work done. They consort where there are scale advantages: to lobby, for example, to negotiate and license, to reduce costs, or to build shared infrastructure.