Shaping Liberal Arts College Library Collections:  New Models and Active Strategies

On October 15-16, 2008, representatives of 36 college libraries and 12 invited guests from other sectors of the library community met at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum (Hyde Park, NY) and Vassar College (Poughkeepsie, NY) for a workshop entitled "Shaping Liberal Arts College Library Collections: New Models and Active Strategies."  The workshop was supported with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the TriCollege Library Consortium (Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges) for collaborative work on library collections, with additional funding from the Council on Library and Information Resources and local arrangement by Vassar College.

 

College libraries, like their university library counterparts, are moving beyond the traditional model of the "book box" library. Like their university counterparts, they are also asking how they can best offer access to information, and how they can most productively collaborate with partners to provide materials to their campuses. But while both research and college libraries are asking similar questions, they are likely to look to different models for answers, because they have to meet user needs in different ways. At colleges, the teaching role of the collections—as well as of the staff and services around them—must fulfill the same promise of personal, professional attention that characterizes college classrooms. But colleges are challenged to meet the increasing costs of offering the range of materials, services, and technologies that colleges' curricula demand. The agenda, therefore, organized discussion around panels and small group discussion about users and their research habits/preferences, academic publishing, and matters of budgets, partnerships, and the design of physical and online spaces for collection use.

 

A planning group invited guests, organized and hosted the program, decided on a set of outcomes they hoped the meeting would achieve, and wrote a set of background papers to orient discussion. The background papers include reports from the library consortia represented at the meeting and on such topics as models for collaborative collections work, users and spaces, budgeting and organization for collections, user behaviors with collections, libraries as publishers, and the “universal” digital library as well as summary statistics of collections trends among Oberlin Group libraries and a bibliography.

 

Over the next several months, the Planning Group will discuss how best to follow up on the workshop and will report on the event at the fall 2009, meeting of the Oberlin Group at Colorado College. They will update this site periodically and will seek other venues and opportunities for publicizing this work. The current fiscal crisis poses substantial challenges to colleges and their libraries we they seek to provide resources for teaching and learning, and collection collaborations among colleges or between colleges and other partners are strategies for meeting these challenges.

 

If this work interests you, please be in touch with Bob Kieft (kieft@oxy.edu) or another member of the Planning Group.