FoundationS 

A well-developed ecosystem supported by a robust infrastructure of knowledge services ensures we will realize the full potential of our collective collections.

To inspire visionary thinking and bold collaboration, empowering our community to collectively meet the challenges of ensuring access to and preserving essential print resources, while fostering a shared responsibility for sustaining a robust and resilient collection ecosystem.

Our work will be guided by the following principles:

Transparency 

The work we facilitate will be community driven with a focus on being open, accountable and consistent.

Inclusion

The work we facilitate will require the engagement of many, diverse stakeholders across the library and research community.

Public Good 

The work we facilitate will prioritize the betterment of libraries and scholarly communities.

Leadership

The work we facilitate has our organizations in a leadership role building upon what others have already started or done. 

These assumptions guide our work and are more completely captured in our 2024 blog series: Shared Print Down the Rabbit Hole and Shared Print and Sustainability through the Looking Glass.

• Organizational inflexibility and silo-ization hinder current efforts to build collaborative shared print collections. 

• Flexible organizations are defined by an exchange of services, data, and resources across organizations and across functional expertise

• Network-level print collections increase in value by developing services for these collections that are demonstrably better than what already exists

• An ecosystem:

  • encourages co-evolution of all organizations 

  • fosters a variety of networks and expertise

  • amplifies integration, shared resources, and complex dependencies

  • incorporates mechanisms and solutions that support flexibility and change

  • harnesses shifting relationships and networks to create a dynamic economy

  • balances maintenance of core services with innovation incubating around the edges

  • mutual gain thinking of local and network