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This interview appears in the January 2010 issue of Collaborative Librarianship, an online journal begun just one year ago by a group of librarians in Colorado, a state with a long history of cooperation and collaboration among its libraries. In its inaugural issue, editor Ivan Gaetz (Regis University) cites a comment by Charles Henry of CLIR as inspiration for a new journal with this focus: “academic libraries increasingly will become multi-institutional entities.” Collaborative Librarianship is the only peer-reviewed, open access journal devoted solely to collaborative pursuits across the broadest spectrum of librarianship.
"No matter how fully the library in the cloud is realized, efficient exchange of material, equipment and staff will continue to require these libraries on the ground. And yea, verily, sharing shall sweep the regions…except for the region of my stuff."
Accepting the premise put forth in CLIR's No Brief Candle that "the research library should be redefined as a multi-institutional entity" - this paper outlines various technical services workflows and the potential "network effects" of collaboration, offering ideas about the kinds of improvements that might be expected.
In January 2009, The Library of Congress retained R2 to research and describe the current marketplace for cataloging records in the MARC format, with primary focus on the economics of current practices, including existing incentives and barriers to both contribution and availability.
At ALA Mid-Winter in Boston, R2 presented a summary of the report at OCLC's Seminar: Dollars and Sense - Paying for the collaborative national bibliographic framework. OCLC recently published a video of that presentation.
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