Outcomes of the Workshop and Continuing Activities:

Going into the workshop, the sponsors and planners hoped that it would advance the conversation nationally about twenty-first century library collections and that it would seed an ongoing conversation within the Oberlin Group and beyond with the following outcomes:

• develop the program for future conferences about collection development in liberal arts colleges;develop discussion points and model strategies for local campuses;

• examine local and consortial collection development methods and strategies and identify best practices;

• broaden the national collections conversation by building a better understanding among college administrators, librarians, and faculty of collection trends, goals, and budgeting;

• create discussion between ARL and college libraries for a multi-sector view of collecting; introduce colleges in national discussion about how best to preserve and share legacy print collections;

• help college libraries, whose smaller staffs make experimentation and introduction of new services harder, attain greater flexibility; facilitate flexibility in the face of cultural change;

• build a library-use culture that values access; and

• possibly publish a CLIR report from the conference.

During the course of the workshop, panels and ensuing discussion were vigorous, with everyone agreeing that the size of the group and the mix of people present were unusually stimulating and conducive to exchanging views. The final discussion sessions resulted in an array of comments, suggestions, and possibilities for action, which the Planning Group are trying to digest into a coherent set of notes and an agenda. After the final discussion session was reported out, four of the participants from outside the college library community, namely, Dan Hazen, Denis Massey, Susan Perry, and Roger Schoenfeld, were asked to comment on the proceedings from the point of view of their own work.

While the follow-up from the event has moved slowly and will be prompted by further meetings of the Planning Group, the following action items are being worked on:

1. The meeting documents have moved from the CLIR website, which had housed them prior the workshop, to the Oberlin Group website in order to afford ongoing access. The Oberlin Group website has been modified to allow public access to the documents and to authorize interaction with them.
2. Pat Tully (Wesleyan University) and Kathy Tezla (Carleton College) are leading a group of collections officers in revising the “best practices” report documents from consortia into a usable form and are investigating other means for enlisting their colleagues in establishing procedural and policy success factors for collaborative collections work among colleges. They are also working on ways to involve reference and departmental liaison librarians in a discussion that involves how college libraries not only build collections users need but “create” users for the collections and other resources they make available.
3. As the conversation developed around the point immediately above, participants at the workshop recognized that college libraries cannot talk about the future of consortial collecting without placing collections in their service context and, more generally, the future of libraries generally in a rapidly changing information environment. To this end, Gene Wiemers (Bates College) offered to start a dialog that would result in alternative vision statements describing possible futures, the behaviors college libraries might undertake today to take them in those directions, the behaviors that would encourage college libraries to move more firmly in those directions, and what the future would look like if college libraries followed those directions to their conclusion. Colleges could then use these vision statements much like architects use alternative scenarios in building planning--none of them is in fact what will happen, but they help to clarify thinking.