Cornell and Columbia Announce Library Collaboration

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $385,000 to the libraries of Columbia and Cornell Universities to explore collaboration in ways that the announcement says could create "the most expansive collaboration to date between major research libraries." While details on how the collaboration will work remain under development, Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian at Cornell, said possibilities include several models in building collections. The universities might "separately build collections in and share via expedited document delivery or electronic access," or "we might also collectively build one collection in some fields, or continue to collect materials at the local level to support instruction and collectively build at the research level." Other areas of possible collaboration include "combining forces for technical processing," such as acquisitions, cataloging, electronic resource management, and data management, or developing a "shared technology infrastructure," with a possible focus on digital preservation, she said.