2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

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BEST PRACTICES 2012
From an interlibrary loan standpoint, “There was little medieval inter-library
cooperation except for the great Franciscan union catalog in fourteenth-century
England, the Registrum liborum Angliae.” (Ibid. p.451)
So, libraries began as a collaboration and have continued as such.
2) A second type of collaboration among libraries is through inter-library loan. An
interlibrary loan motto could be, “The more we share; the more we have.”
Librarians by nature are collaborative; It’s a natural fit. We like helping. We are “on
call” for each other as well as for our firms and institutions.
Inter-library loan has had a special place in the Copyright Law of the US - section
108 which allows copying for inter-library loan. We must encourage the
perpetuation of this special place in the electronic medium. Copyright of electronic
resources may reduce the ability to lend titles among libraries but negotiations are
ongoing to allow lending of e-books as well.
According to OverDrive, Kindle e-books have the same lending terms as existing
library e-books. After three weeks they will no longer open. So, libraries can use ebooks
to fill inter-library loan requests and for holds on new bestsellers.
Overall, one ILL tenet to remember is, “Ask someone who knows.” Don’t try to
reinvent the wheel; ask the expert for guidance when you are in a new field. A
significant amount of ILL collaboration takes place on listservs of library
associations such as AALL, SLA Legal Division and News Division, Law Librarians
Society of DC, New York (LLAGNY) and others.
There can be interdepartmental collaboration for broader use of knowledge skills.
For example, Columbia University and Cornell University are collaborating through
the TCUL program so that one librarian oversees the Eastern European collection of
both universities.
Inter-Library Loan has been a shining star of collaboration in libraries for years.
3) A third type is collaboration in libraries with various locations. Our colleague,
Doug Malerba, has spoken on his experience of telecommuting full-time from
another city. Collaborating with colleagues regardless of location is becoming usual:
global locations, telecommuting, time zone differences, hoteling colleagues,
temporary assignments, employees detailed to another location or distributed
within the firm to disparate locations within practice groups. All contribute to the
need for collaboration through communication in various ways among various
locations.
One specific example is that of embedded librarians, which has been researched by
David Shumaker at Catholic University. These librarians are located within practice
groups or within the location of the clients they are serving similar to embedded
reporters in war.
One research paper by Forrester Consulting Commissioned by Citrix from November
2010 is entitled, ”Making Collaboration Work for the 21st Century’s Distributed