Academic Library Collaboration: The Hong Kong Perspective

Peter E SidorkoThe University of Hong Kong

Library collaboration:Tensions and success.

• “Civilization exists within the context of … irresolvable tension born of compromise. To reap the benefits of a civilized existence, we need to curb certain natural tendencies. Library consortial activities … embody and reveal several irresolvable tensions.“

• Peters, Thomas A. “Consortia and their discontents.” Journal of Academic Librarianship, 29:2 111-114, March 2003

Typical obstacles to collaboration

• “rivalry and competition, mistrust and jealousy, politics and personalities, different institutional priorities and indifferent institutional administrators, unequal development and parochialism … negative attitudes, such as skepticism, fear of loss, reluctance to take risks, and the pervasive lack of tradition of cooperation”

• Fe Angela M. Verzosa, The future of library cooperation in Southeast Asia, p.7, 2004 Asian Library and Information Conference (ALIC), 21 -24 November, 2004. Bangkok, Thailand

Collaboration at Multiple Levels

• Librarians• Libraries• Faculty• Curriculum designers• Students• Museums• Student support

services

• Teaching support units• Learning technologists• Pedagogical units• Publishers• Community• Technology vendors

The power ofcollaboration

Radical collaboration

“The future health of the research library will be increasingly defined by new and energetic relationships and combinations, and the radicalization of working relationships among research libraries, between libraries and the communities they serve, and in new entrepreneurial partnerships”

– Neal, J.G. Advancing from Kumbaya to radical collaboration: redefining the future research library, in Transforming Research Libraries for the Global Knowledge Society (B.I. Dewey (ed.), Oxford: Chandos, 2010 (p. 13).

The Hong Kong Situation

Hong Kong Higher Education

• 8 government funded institutes of higher learning (UGC)• 3 ranked in the top 50 in the world – HKU (23); HKUST

(33); CUHK (40) - (QS Rankings, 2012)• 69,000 UGC funded students (2011/12) – 14% non-local• Four year curriculum commenced September 2012 –

double cohort 3 year and 4 year programs in parallel• Double 1st year intake for each institution• Estimated total students now 86,000• Desire for “deep collaboration” among the eight• Desire to be THE Asian education hub.

The University of Hong Kong - HKU

About HKU

• Evolved from the Hong Kong College of Medicine, founded in 1887

• Founded 1911, HK’s first• Multidisciplinary/comprehensive - undergraduate

& postgraduate• 26,000 students (Government & self funded)• 111,000 students (Continuing education school)

HKU Print CollectionsTotal Volumes 2,925,630

Current Print Journals 9,071

Cancelled Print Journals 42,044

HKU Digital CollectionsE-books 3,481,589E-journals 41,613E-databases 681

• The Joint University Librarians Advisory Committee (JULAC)

• Established in 1967 by the Heads of Universities Committee (HUCOM).

• A forum to discuss, coordinate, and collaborate on library information resources and services.

• Members comprise the 8 higher ed. institutions funded by the UGC.

• Several affiliate members.

• Small in terms of member libraries• Diversity in institutional profiles and priorities• Recent Director departures 6/8• Commitment and willingness• Unitary governance (UGC through HUCOM)• Skills, specialisations, diverse educational

backgrounds• Geography• JULAC Manager

JULAC• Striving towards Collaboration• Recent collaborative efforts– Purchasing, e and print– Cataloguing– Statistics– Reference– Reciprocal (walk in) borrowing– LibQual+– HKALL – deep collaboration– JURA– And others

• Hong Kong Academic Library Link• User initiated, unmediated ILL among the 8

JULAC libraries• Books delivered to your home library• Union catalogue of all monograph holdings of the

8 libraries• First of its kind in Asia• First in the World to include a large number of

Chinese vernacular items• A virtual distributed shared storage!!

Monograph overlapNumber of titles = 8,804,625

Number of volumes = 11,477,980Number

of librariesTitles

1 6,437,713 73%2 1,244,843 14.14%3 528,898 6.01%4 258,074 2.93%5 170,410 1.94%6 89,569 1.02%

7+ 75,118 0.85%

HKALL introduced

Borrowing

Lending

INN-Reach Requests per Library

INNReach System Libraries Total Requests Requests per Library

Hong Kong ALL 8 221,348 27,669

Prospector 25 670,719 26,829

SearchOhio 17 418,043 24,591

LINK+ 45 583,621 12,970

Mobius 14 178,645 12,760

The Circuit 5 52,496 10,499

OhioLink 87 804,022 9,242

Busiest INN-Reach in the World!

… and why is this important?

• It set a new standard for collaborative efforts in Hong Kong academic libraries

• It has created an expectation among users and stakeholders

• It forms a basis for future collaborative efforts, in particular – joint storage.

UGC Report December 2010

“We are thus, in general, disappointed at the level of collaboration … There are, however, areas of success: … the collaboration by libraries on a new joint storage facility and sharing of books.”

Within the decade groups of universities will have shared print and digital repositories where they store books they no longer care to manage. “There are national discussions about how and to what extent we can begin to collaborate institutionally to share the cost of storing and managing books,”

Daniel Greenstein, Inside Higher Ed (vice provost for academic planning and programs at the University of California System) http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/24/libraries

Repository experience at HKU

Use of Print Materials: HKU

Remote storage usage

Down 68.8% in 9 years

Remote storage usage

Up 152.8% over 9 years230,000 Volumes transferredbetween 2004- 2013

Benefits of Collaborative Storage

• Finance, efficacy, spirituality• Building costs: 1 to 3• Rationalisation: less to manage• Staffing: centralised, economies of scale• Space• Preservation• Central ILL/DD

Non-collaborative Print Storage?

Issues arise, decisions to be made

• The facility: sharing or managing• The collection: sharing or managing• Ownership• Access• Costs• Logistics• Management• Governance

This brings us to … The Joint Universities Research Archive

(JURA)

… to provide Hong Kong’s JULAC libraries with an efficient, sustainable and secure climate-controlled storage and retrieval facility for research materials that promotes shared access to scholarly information and facilitates the effective use of space within existing library buildings.

Overall goal

• Provide fast and cost-effective access to lesser used, but still important, research materials

Model

… one of joint ownership, de-duplicated material, and management by a new body representing the stakeholders

Governance

• Jointly owned by eight JULAC Libraries• JULAC Joint Universities Research Archive

Limited (a charitable organisation)• Board of Directors – 8 JULAC Librarians

Shared costs

• Equally share at least part of the recurrent costs of the facility

• Relative size of their institutions and taking into consideration the potential number of users at each institution

• Relative number of volumes each library is projecting to deposit in the Archive.

Capacity

• 5.27 million volumesleading to• 8.432 million volumesafter expansion

Design

• Main building block– 3 floors (each floor equal to 3 regular building floors)– each 13.85m high– inbuilt capacity to add extra floor– Ultimately, equal to a 12 storey building– Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS)

• Attached block– Administration office– E & M

JURA will have

• 59,000 metal bins (2’x4’ footprint).

• Different heights: 6” to 18” deep.

• Each bin can hold 750 lbs.

• Each storey has 4 aisles, each with a robotic crane.

• Each aisle is 35 -40 tiers high.

• 2 workstations per aisle with barcode scanners & printers.

A 12 Storey Building

• 4 stories high ultimately

but initially only 3

• 1 JURA storey = 3 regular

floors

• So ultimately like a 12

storey building

JURA

JURA Location

The Current Status

• Three requirements by UGC:– Detailed design– Incorporation– Land allocated

• Final hurdle:– Capital Works Resource Allocation Exercise

(CWRAE) ie money

Obstacles to JURA collaboration

• Metrics – perceived library status• Funding• Physical access• Geography• Competition vs collaboration• Faculty reactions• Institutional commitments• And the usual collaboration issues…

JURA:The Dawn of a New Era in

Collaboration

JURA: A catalyst for change?

• Commitment• Common, new goals: strategic • Common, new goals: operational– Cataloguing and bibliographic services– Processing– Digitisation– Digital repository

JURA: A catalyst for change?

• Better and more coordinated planning efforts– Joint strategies– Evaluation, qualitative and quantitative, RoI

• Better communication, across multiple levels• Strengthened alliances: unified and targeted• Catalyst for change – intra and extra

JURA: A catalyst for change?

• Better knowledge of our own collection(s), and each others

• Improved collection development• Greater innovation• Transformation of existing spaces for new user

needs or trading/returning space to the campus for other priorities.

Thank you!!

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