ACRL New England Chapter News Online

ISSN 1527-0106

Spring 2006, Number 108

In This Issue (Home):

President's Letter

Annual Conference Summaries:

C & B Committee Report

Legislative Report

Interest Group Reports and Announcements:

Board Meeting Minutes, March 10, 2006
Calendar Listings

Expanding Collections through Collaboration

Marianne Arruda, MLIS Candidate
University of Rhode Island

At the ACRL/ New England Chapter 2006 Spring Conference, Sherrie Bergman, Walter Komorowski, and David M. Pilachowski presented “Expanding Collections through Collaboration” as a breakout session during the afternoon program. Sherrie Bergman of Bowdoin College began the session by charting the development of CBB, a consortium of three Maine academic libraries – Bowdoin College, Bates College and Colby College. 1997 proved to be a significant milestone year for the development of CBB as the consortium received a Mellon grant to provide a common graphical user interface across the three catalogs, developed a web site for CBB, and established shared loan rules – a feat that Sherrie point out “can be more complicated than the technical aspects of shared systems”. In addition to CBB, Bowdoin also participates in Info Net, a state-run consortium of Maine libraries.

Sherrie talked about how the consortium grew from three to six member libraries when Northeastern University, Wellesley College, and Williams College joined and NExpress was formed. She presented screen caps of the Bowdoin catalog screens that present patrons with a choice to search Info Net or NExpress. Data presented show that, during the period 7/1/05 through 3/31/06, 84% of Bowdoin’s borrowed items came from either Info Net or NExpress.

David Pilachowski of Williams College talked about how forming NExpress supported his library’s strategic goal to “develop new library partnerships” to “expand resource sharing”. During his description of the planning process, he underscored the importance of involving staff across departments and developing a “coordinated strategy”. Though Williams College already participated in the Boston Library Consortium (BLC), NExpress was an attractive additional consortium choice due to the strength of the partner institutions and the ability to access non-returnables via INN-Reach software developed by Innovative Interfaces.

David presented data showing how utilization of NExpress has “increased exponentially” from July 2005 through March 2006. As of April 20, 2006, 10,005 items have circulated among the six partner institutions. David concluded by noting that the partners were guided by a commitment to “do as much as we could together”.

Walter Komorowski of Williams College discussed the process of implementing the Union Catalog and the non-returnables service. Walter covered the major decision points that needed to be resolved. The most challenging decision points were: how individual holdings would be matched; what items would appear in the catalog; and, how records would be indexed. While exploring the “matching” issue, it was discovered that there was a high degree of uniqueness among the partners’ bibliographic records – 68% of items were owned by one partner only.

The decision regarding what resources to include forced the partners to decide whether NExpress would be a “discovery tool” or a “requesting tool”. It was decided to consider NExpress a “discovery tool” and to include some items that could not circulate, unless licensing use restrictions prohibited inclusion to the catalog. Walter explained that the issue of how records would be indexed proved to be the most difficult decision point due to differences in local cataloging practices and policies.

Walter then described the process of requesting non-returnables and presented screen-caps to display the form utilized to request an article. The software searches member library holdings and prints paging slips. Articles are posted in PDF format to a secure web site with a notification sent to the requester. The link to the article is automatically deleted after 30 days. The software also provides an automatic export system to ILLiad if the article is not available among NExpress partner holdings. Walter stated that nearly 60% of the requests are being filled. The remaining 40% of requests are routed to ILL. Ongoing issues that require further discussion and resolution include reconciling records from different vendors and establishing service hours that make sense.

A spirited question and answer session followed the presentation. Issues at the forefront of the minds of audience members included: suggestions for license language to allow for ILL sharing; the consortium’s mechanism for payment of copyright fees; and, issues surrounding storage of patron data.

It was clear that all three presenters were excited about the success of the beta phase of the NExpress collaboration and the prospects for continued development of the project.