Collective Collection
A Collective Collection refers to the shared resources of multiple libraries, archives, and museums. Collective Collections can be leveraged to benefit all institutional stakeholders, including researchers, scholars, students, and patrons.
OCLC Research’s Collective Collection work provides evidence and insight to support decision-making into how cultural heritage institutions organize shared collections and services. Through this work, OCLC Research is helping to create a more connected, collaborative landscape for libraries, archives, and museums, with the goal of making collections more accessible, impactful, and cost-efficient.
Projects
OCLC Interlibrary Loan Cost Calculator
A web based tool that allows library administrators and practitioners to better understand the costs of sharing collections.
SHARES
SHARES is a program of expedited, cost-saving interlibrary lending that also develops innovative new methods to improve collections sharing.
Scope and Diffusion of National Presence in the Published Record
This report uses Scotland as a case study to illustrate this concept of national presence, explain how this presence can be operationalized in library data and demonstrate how the data can be used to define patterns of analysis characterizing the general contours of a national presence and its diffusion worldwide
Stewarding the Collective Collection
OCLC Research has developed concepts, frameworks, and innovative patterns of analysis for collective collections at group, regional, and global scales.
University Futures, Library Futures
OCLC Research collaborated with colleagues at Ithaka S+R on a project examining the impact of increased institutional differentiation in universities on the organization of academic libraries and the services they provide.
Completed Projects
Cloud Library: Cloud-sourcing Shared Research Collections
This work modeled requirements for increased institutional reliance on shared print and digital repositories, based on a case study of a single consumer institution and two representative print and digital suppliers. It offers recommendations for broader adoption of interdependent collection management regimes in the cloud. (Completed 2011)
OhioLINK Collection & Circulation Analysis
A joint project with the OhioLINK library consortium and OhioLINK’s Collection Building Task Force, which examined bibliographic, holdings, and circulation data from Ohio college and university libraries to better understand the usage patterns of books in academic libraries
Print Management at "Mega-scale"
This work provided a deep understanding of what regionally-consolidated print collections would look like if they came to pass, and what the implications would be for system-wide issues such as mass digitization, resource sharing, and preservation.
Right-scaling Stewardship: A System-wide Perspective on Print Books in the CIC
This project was a collaboration between OCLC Research, CIC and OSU that examined the criteria academic institutions should consider when selecting books for shared print collections and explored the scale at which library stewardship of print books might be organized in years to come. (Completed 2014)