News

We are happy to announce a series of mini-summits focused on sustainability in shared print. 

Importance of Shared Print Sustainability - Setting the Stage (60 minutes)

• Wednesday, January 29 at 11am PT/10am CT/8am PT

Establishing the Problem Space (90 minutes) 

• Tuesday, February 18 at 12pm ET/11am CT/9am PT

Aligning Sustainability with Strategy (90 minutes) 

• Thursday, March 13 at 3pm ET/2pm CT/12pm PT

The CCH Collaboration is excited to bring the community together to increase our shared understanding of sustainability within the context of shared print. These discussions will be framed around ideas raised in our two Scholarly Kitchen blogs, and our vision of the future of shared print that incorporates the embedding of shared print in library operations, highlights the importance of diversity among our organizations and promotes ever-evolving systems, tools, actions, and relationships.

Please contact us if you would like to register for the individual events. These will be recorded and the recordings will be shared with registered participants and posted on the CCH website following the event. 

We look forward to exploring this topic with you all at the mini-summits. 

The California Digital Library, Center for Research Libraries, and HathiTrust’s Shared Print Collaboration is changing. Since we launched our collaboration in June 2020, we have made substantial progress toward our founding mission and vision, however almost five years in we have evolved as a collaboration. 

Initially, we focused on technical infrastructure as the connecting force for the shared print community. Our thinking has evolved to encompass a broader aim: embedding shared print throughout the collection lifecycle, with a strong emphasis on sustainability. As a result, we have updated our vision, mission, principles, and key assumptions. 

Vision

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

Mission

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.

You can see these updates, along with an updated about page, and revised principles and assumptions on our website. 

As part of our foundational setting work, we are also excited to announce a series of mini-summits coming in early 2025 focused on sustainability in shared print. We will share more details about those soon. 

CCH continues to center its work around its principles of transparency, inclusion, public good, responsiveness, and facilitative leadership. We are proud of our work with our colleagues in building awareness of the need to embed shared print in the lifecycle of collections. 

This past year, we have worked to increase our understanding of sustainability within the context of shared print. In doing so, we wondered what the path to a sustainable future for shared print would be. We tested some of our ideas in two Scholarly Kitchen blogs and appreciated early feedback. We realized that we cannot answer the question of where we are going alone. We want to support an exchange of ideas and assumptions testing to realize a successful future. To that end, we are sharing our vision of the future of shared print that incorporates the embedding of shared print in library operations, highlights the importance of diversity among our organizations, and promotes ever-evolving systems, tools, actions and relationships.

We happily anticipate working even more closely with you toward our shared [print] future!

Blog post 1: Shared Print Down the Rabbit Hole

Blog post 2: Shared Print and Sustainability through the Looking Glass

Update

Update

During the Summit for Shared Print in the Collection Lifecycle Greg Eow (President, Center for Research Libraries), Mike Furlough (Executive Director, HathiTrust), and Günter Waibel (Associate Vice Provost & Executive Director, California Digital Library) opened with a talk on the value of collaboration. You can now read their remarks in the Summit for Shared Print in the Collection Lifecycle opening transcript.

On December 1st & 2nd of 2021, the Collaboration hosted a summit bringing together the shared print community, library functional experts, and service providers to create an action plan to embed shared print in the collections lifecycle. 

On January 12th & 24th of 2022, the Collaboration held two post-summit webinars to report out on the summit, its outcomes, and next steps. 

Summit documentation and outcomes, as well as post-summit webinar slides, recording, and notes are all available on on the CCH website under the header “After the Summit.” 

Update

Update

Recording for this webinar. 

Recording for this webinar.

Recording for this webinar. 

Recording for this webinar.

Recording for this webinar.

Slides for this presentation.

Dear colleagues,

The future of print collections is shared. Embedding shared print within the lifecycle of library collections promotes equity of access, enriches the scholarly record, and increases opportunity for research and teaching. A well-developed, collaborative, and interoperable infrastructure ensures we will realize the full potential of our networks and their collective collections. 

This is why we were proud to announce at the Print Archive Network Forum in January 2020, that  the California Digital Library (CDL), the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), and HathiTrust (HT), with the support of the Rosemont Shared Print Alliance and the Partnership for Shared Book Collections, will work together to build on a decade of collaboration, innovation and expertise to define a new phase of shared print built on open and interconnected infrastructure. 

This collaborative effort is emerging from the rich background of local and regional shared print programs’ expansion, interconnection, and technical innovation. We see an opportunity for our three organizations (CDL, CRL, and HT) to step into a facilitative leadership role, to gather the threads of the broader community’s considerable efforts and to advance shared print’s transition to a new phase of integration and interoperability.

This new phase coalesces the regional work into a strategic national effort. Working together in a coordinated fashion, we can assemble, preserve, and make accessible a more expansive and diverse shared collection for the scholarly community.

Over the last two months, CDL, CRL, and HT have met regularly and outlined a mission, vision, principles and assumptions to serve as anchors, or touchpoints, to ensure that this work reflects the values and needs of our broader community. You can find these in the attached document. Each of these draws on the combined expertise of our three organizations, as well as the work of the Rosemont Shared Print Alliance and the Partnership for Shared Book Collections. We welcome comments or questions. Please feel free to reach out to Alison Wohlers (alison.wohlers@ucop.edu), Amy Wood (wood@crl.edu), or Heather Weltin (weltin@hathitrust.org). 

We want this effort to remain embedded in the community it is meant to serve and we want to engage that community meaningfully in the work. Therefore, we are developing a communications strategy that sets out an intentional course of action in the area of both internal and external communications to highlight this project’s priorities, values, achievements, services, and activities that are planned through 2020 and beyond.

Together we will achieve a shared print collection that in its scale and breadth represents the future of sustainable collection development and management. Our organizations look forward to going on this journey with the rest of the shared print community. 

Sincerely,

Greg Eow, President, Center for Research Libraries

Mike Furlough, Executive Director, HathiTrust

Günter Waibel, Associate Vice Provost and Executive Director, California Digital Library