Action for Libraries
Forward Focus on Collaboration
Brenda Bailey-Hainer, Executive Director
As BCR continues to expand its current product and service offerings to member institutions, we will look to enhance services through many different creative methods. However, arguably the most important, the most cost-effective and easily the most valuable of these methods is the use of collaboration.
As a cooperative ourselves, it only makes sense for BCR to cooperate at a higher level with other organizations that have similar missions and goals. In today's flattened world, resources and knowledge are fragmented across many different organizations, each of which may have its own general area of expertise. Knowledge is increasingly specialized and must be pooled in order to solve problems effectively.
There has been evidence of collaboration already. In September, BCR was a cosponsor of two national meetings, both held in Denver. The first was a two-day symposium on library delivery services, provided in partnership with the Colorado Library Consortium (CLiC) and the Colorado State Library. It brought together representatives from 28 states and two Canadian provinces. It allowed dialogue on a topic not often covered in other meetings and has resulted in an informal network of those interested in continuing the discussion.
The second event was an exciting three-day workshop organized by NISO (National Information Standards Organization) called Managing Electronic Collections. Through our sponsorship, BCR was able to secure registration discounts for staff from BCR member institutions and to help bring national experts in a highly technical field to the Rocky Mountain region.
Last month we announced the merger of the Collaborative Digitization Program into BCR. The CDP is a perfect example of a successful collaborative in action. The CDP brings together experts from such diverse organizations as university libraries, state library agencies, historical societies, museums and public libraries. These organizations are based in many different states across the West and Midwest. (Note: for more background information on the CDP, see the article on page 1 in this issue.) Staff from these different organizations work together through CDP's working groups. This working environment makes use of peer-to-peer collaborative activities to build participants' skills and knowledge base. The focus is on building and sharing knowledge among practitioners. It helps them connect to solve problems, share ideas, set standards, build tools and develop relationships.
The CDP working groups focus on specific areas, such as metadata, and help codify best practices and set standards for joint projects. But every member of the group also is involved in continuous learning in solving problems, using the collective knowledge of everyone involved. Working together collaboratively leverages the knowledge of all of our organizations and helps us respond quickly, efficiently and more responsively.
BCR will be using CDP's successful model to expand active participation and knowledge generation through the use of working groups. So far, plans are to create a Digital Initiatives Advisory Group that will assist in overall planning at a high level for CDP@BCR programs and activities. In addition, a K-12 Working Group and an Open Source Working Group will be established to help us gain more knowledge in those areas.
If you would like to participate in one of these new working groups, contact us. If you have ideas for other areas where pooling our knowledge resources can make a difference, please don't hesitate to voice these suggestions to us. After all, collectively we represent a vast knowledge repository and sharing that knowledge makes us all the wiser.