At the June Board of Directors meeting of the BLC, the Resource Sharing Strategic Priority Committee was charged with developing proposals for transforming resource sharing in the BLC. At the December Board meeting the committee reported on opportunities it recommends for enhancing and re imagining resource sharing.

The Co-Chairs, Janet Stewart (UMB) and Sherry Keen (Brandeis) led discussion of the report on three proposals. Dave Pilachowski facilitated the conversation. The three project recommendations were:

1. “The Committee strongly recommends that the BLC look at the governance model of the IDS Project in New York to learn how it shares staff skills across a number of diverse institutions.” IDS (Information Delivery Services) was created to improve resource sharing after the statewide system was discontinued. IDS was the primary mover of the Getting It System Toolkit (GIST) for resource sharing.


For more on IDS, see http://idsproject.org/about/aboutus.aspx

For more on GIST, see http://idsproject.org/tools/gist.aspx



2. “To make resource sharing more convenient and less consumptive of our users’s time the BLC should develop a system to share copies of electronic materials that would allow users to user their 'BLC E-Card'.” The Resource Sharing Strategic Priority Committee discussed their ideas with some of the COI’s. In their report, they note that “The ILL COI strongly advocates working with RAPID as a vendor to develop the features of the system.”


3. “The BLC should take an active role in preserving and making accessible the scholarly resources of its member institutions in a coordinated way. As it transitions to electronic formats the BLC should look for ways to coordinate current print acquisitions to ensure diverse holdings and thereby its ability to maintain and share holdings amongst the members.” It was suggested that Orbis/Cascade be approached about their cooperative collection development activities.

The conversation was lively and included the hope that the Board would build on the momentum of the Committee recommendations and discussion. On behalf of the Management Council, Dave Pilachowski stated that the it would be discussing next steps in moving the suggested innovations forward at its meeting on December 8. The directors were very impressed with the Committee report and the specific areas for further exploring new ways of sharing resources.

Follow up Actions by Management Council

In its follow-up meetings, Management Council discussed specific next steps to build on the conversations of December 2nd. Brian Greene (NEU), Kathy Leigh (UMass Amherst), and Alison O’Grady (Williams) will begin exploring options for working with RAPID toward E-CARD concepts. Christine Quirion and Janet Stewart will learn more about IDS’s governance and best practices in staff sharing in order to provide the basis for discussions with Management Council or the Board on how the IDS concept of staff sharing could be applied within the BLC.

Thanks to David Pilachowski, President of the BLC, for his summary of the Dec. 2 Board meeting

For Additional Information, contact Melissa Trevvett, Executive Director