Nooks and Crannies

Some people really enjoy the research part of a paper, while others live for the writing part.  I am definitely of the former, and my little joys of late have been the interesting discoveries of obscure library journals that weren’t published for very long but had great articles during their short lifespans.  Tonight’s example is Library Consortium Management: an international journal.  LCM only had 8 issues, from 1999 to 2000, but these few small issues are teaching me incredible things about library consortia!  For example, I’m reading an article about the stages of development for library networks – when they go from simply purchasing shared resources to being “incorporated” and the consortia becomes a body of its own outside of the individual libraries.  I automatically think of the Orbis-Cascade Alliance from my previous life.  The member libraries were from universities and colleges across the Pacific Northwest, but the consortia had its own little office and even staff to handle all the administrative aspects of making sure things went smoothly for the libraries.  This is exactly the kind of thing I hope to chart out in my paper.

Word of the day: Cooperations

I seem to have found at least one solution to my search term problem of yesterday — “library cooperations” or at least that was the catch phrase in the 80s.  I’m not sure if it’s really still used in the literature today, but I have the beginnings of a bread crumb trail now.  I discovered a couple shelves full of the stuff in the 021.64 area of the Library Science Library (ha! … sounds like something out of that new show Pushing Daisies, like the Darling Mermaid Darlings).

I’m a little worried that most of the material I’ve found so far is rather dated.  I only have a few things from the 90s and nothing from the Aughts.  Hmmm…

Libraries in plural

A group of librarians is called a “shush”… believe it or not… but what about a group of libraries? A shushtette?

My goal for this Independent Study as I laid it out in the proposal was to survey the literature regarding international library partnerships and/or “sister library” programs to see how the partnerships were measured in terms of success or benefit for the member libraries. I envisioned a beautiful, well-organized table of information about all the partnerships I could find, with fields describing the type of libraries involved (public, school, academic…), how long they had worked together, what they shared in the partnership, which countries were represented and so on.

I did not take into account the role that library associations might play in these partnerships. My initials searches through the databases have turned up articles about professional associations, libraries partnered with businesses, libraries and the digital divide, but very little about international library partnerships in the sense that I’m hoping to find. Lots of information about digital libraries and libraries getting networked in the technical, online way. Every once in awhile I’ll find “library network” describing a consortia – bingo! But these are few and far between.

Which leads me to wonder if I should adjust the scope of my topic… are today’s library consorita primarily digital partnerships? What are these library partnerships calling themselves? Hmph.