2014 Charleston Library Conference

What do you get when you forge a collaboration between a public library and two private, research institutions, combine their collections of nearly 65 million items and open it all up to a population of potentially 17 million patrons? Extreme sharing. This session will cover the ideas and forces that gave rise to the Manhattan Research Library Initiative (MaRLI). We’ll discuss why it’s significant that a researcher at Columbia or NYU can now walk into the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library and walk out with a book from NYPL’s previously non-circulating research collection. And we’ll talk about the risks involved, both real and perceived, of opening to the masses the heretofore restricted collections of NYU and Columbia. We’ll walk through some of the goals of the collaboration, angled specifically from a collection development standpoint – namely, to better serve our researchers by expanding the collections available at all three institutions; eliminating (or at least reducing) overlap of specialized materials; and identifying opportunities for shared collecting. We’ll describe the process a researcher must go through to become ‘vetted’ for cross-institutional access. We’ll provide data on the number of researchers who have registered and how many items they have requested. Working with a range of publishers and vendors, the collection development officers at all three institutions have successfully worked through differences in collecting strategies to forge opportunities for making available to their patrons a wide range of material, including low-use scholarly monographs and sparsely held collections of foreign material. We’ll discuss strategies for joint acquisition of e-Resources, particularly eBook collections and will wrap up with a discussion about strategies the group is considering for the future. Time will be allotted for questions and discussion toward the end of the session.