Better Together …, But How?John Wilkin

Juanita J. and Robert E. Simpson Dean of LibrariesUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

ITHAKA – THE NEXT WAVE 2016

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Governance provides the greatest challenges in conceiving a multi-institutional, shared digital library. The [partners] will undertake a series of meetings and a planning and research process to establish an effective model. The last decade has seen a significant number of new models for creating shared resources. These have varied significantly, depending on their goals and the tasks at hand. Non-profits such as OCLC ... have long-demonstrated the efficacy of community funding of shared, central resources. Consortia such as the CIC ... have been effective vehicles for coordinating distributed activities. Organizations like the Apache Foundation ... have emerged with strong models for collaborative software development and distribution. We will, in this effort, begin to explore questions around the creation of hybrid model incorporating many of the virtues of each of these types of entities.

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First principles• The closer the “agency” is to our institutional

interests, the more likely the concepts are to be well-understood and the services are to fulfill the needs of our libraries.

• Our libraries do many things individually that should instead be done collectively, at least partly because doing them together can make them dramatically more cost-effective.

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HathiTrust• Cost: $3.2m/year• Repository: 14.7m vols (5.7m open)• Activities like– Preservation– Discovery– HTRC– Print management & government docs

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ArchivesSpace• Cost: $850k/year• System: “Built for archives by archivists,

ArchivesSpace is the open source archives information management application for managing and providing web access to archives, manuscripts and digital objects.”

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Organizational embedding• HathiTrust– “agency relationship” (cf. ICPSR) @ U-M– Contracts with individual institutions– MOU and bylaws

• ArchivesSpace– “organizational home” in LYR– Agreement between NYU/UCSD/UIUC & LYR– Bylaws

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Economics• HathiTrust– Cost of work: $3.2m– Cost to UIUC: < $50k

• ArchivesSpace– Cost of work: $850k– Cost to UIUC: $7,500