BIG Collection Collective Action

By Kate McCready (Visiting Program Officer for Academy Owned Scholarly Publishing, Big Ten Academic Alliance; Librarian, University of Minnesota, USA) <kate.mccready@btaa.org > btaa.org

Abstract

To increase access to materials, reduce storage costs, and leverage their collective buying power, academic libraries are working across institutions to develop and manage their independent collections collaboratively. This collective action affects all disciplines and includes such areas as collaborative collection development, strengthening publishing infrastructure, facilitating shared collection management, enhancing discovery and accessibility, and establishing long-term commitments to preservation. Part of developing shared collections is also harnessing our collective influence to foster the creation of open access content — both through licensing agreement negotiations and direct investments in content creation or open access publishing infrastructure. These emerging practices advance the research needs and practices of Humanities’ scholars through at-scale action that fosters growth and trust in values-aligned Humanities’ publishers.

The Big Ten Academic Alliance [BTAA], a growing consortium of academic institutions across the United States, is deeply invested in building the “BIG Collection.” The BIG Collection is an established commitment across the libraries of the BTAA to an interdependent future; moving the independent collections into one, shared and fully networked, collection of resources. Between the current members, the collective collection of records now contains well over 100,000,000 (100 million records), with over 44,390,000 unique item matches. The 2019 analysis done by OCLC Research reported that the BTAA libraries steward over one fifth of the print titles in the U.S.1 The vision guiding this effort is to create a brimming pool that includes every piece of print and digital content from member universities where every student and faculty member has seamless discovery-to-delivery access to the pool. To realize this vision, the BTAA is relying on collective action.

Unlike in other countries, the U.S. has a decentralized library model; there is little national governmental coordination of infrastructure, services, or development. But, there is a lot of energy at the consortia and state level to coordinate activities that are best done at-scale. The unparalleled scale and relative coherence of the BTAA libraries working together means that the group has extraordinary opportunities to realize their ideals.

Within the framework of building the BIG collection, the BTAA is working to change approaches to developing, managing, and creating our collections. For example, within collection development, the traditional adversarial model has libraries and publishers each working to advance their own interests. The BTAA libraries have an established “buying club” that uses their collective influence to purchase content at a lower cost. This is still a useful tactic, but perhaps libraries are too poised to fight and publishers are too poised to view libraries as just a revenue source. The BTAA is asking what needs to shift when cost savings and revenue generation are not the only value propositions. How do we shift from a “purchasing” mindset to an “investment” mindset when negotiating with publishers that have aligned values? What must change when the aim is to create more open access content? Additionally, do Humanities publishers require a different approach?

The context for this repositioning is important. As noted in Inside Higher Education in January 2023, academic libraries spend about 80 percent of their materials budget on ongoing commitments to subscriptions (including databases, journals, eBook packages, and streaming audiovisual packages). About 18 percent is spent on one-time purchases (including books and ebooks). The rest of the materials budget goes to collection support through interlibrary loans, copyright fees, and external cataloging fees. As the missions of academic institutions expand, the proportion of the budget spent on libraries has decreased. In 1985, library expenditures made up 4 percent of a research university’s budget. In 2015, they would make up only 2 percent. In that time, those university budgets have increased 750 percent, while library budgets have increased only 230 percent. The cost savings for universities on libraries have tended to come mostly from personnel expenditure savings. Library spending on materials increased about 360 percent between 1985 and 2015, while spending on salaries increased only 180 percent.2 The bottom line is that libraries need to do more with less. Collective action is not only helpful in this context, it is essential.

Additionally, libraries are facing collection management challenges as their physical spaces are no longer sufficient to hold new print acquisitions. As demonstrated by the remarkable growth in shared print initiatives,3 where libraries are making cooperative retention agreements to spread out the responsibility of long-term preservation of materials so that each library can reduce its own collections’ footprint, libraries are simultaneously facing space shortages.

These budgetary and space constraints, combined with reactions to commercial publishing practices, have also created new collection development trends. Academic libraries have increasingly shifted from print acquisitions to e-preferred (except for area studies collections and some other specialized materials where print is still best) to both alleviate the pressure on limited space availability and also provide greater access to the materials (e.g., multi-user eBooks can be used as course materials). Increasingly, licensing ebook collections is being done collaboratively by consortia. While approval plans, (where materials are automatically selected by matches on subjects, publishers, and keywords), are relied on to bring most one-time purchases into the libraries, there is a move to support more “request-based” collection building. Access to materials in digital format remains conceptually “in-print” forever; libraries no longer need to purchase content “just in case.” Consortia are also strengthening their collective investments in journal packages and interlibrary loan operations.

These trends as being examined in the BTAA because each benefit from working collectively at scale. It’s important to note that development of the BIG Collection is not about “buying one copy and sharing it”: it’s about collectively buying permanent, seamless access to content. This work has largely been focused on recurring purchases from larger publishers and has occurred mostly in the Sciences and database purchase areas; however, the academic institution budget trends and library space constraints are causing the need for changes in practices across all library investment areas, including the Humanities.

The BIG Collection effort must look carefully at each area it is impacting. One question being asked today is how can libraries create changes within their Humanities purchasing practices that address these constraints while still supporting the relevant scholars? Based on internal analysis done at the University of Minnesota Libraries, a BTAA member institution, the collection development team learned that the percentage ratio for the Humanities portion of collections budget allocations was roughly equal to the makeup of the Humanities faculty and student body population. While some BTAA organizations reported that they needed to do this type of analysis, many reported similar findings. This indicates that there is (still) significant investments in the Humanities but the constraints, and the makeup of Humanities publishers, are requiring thoughtful changes.

While some are for-profit organizations, many Humanities publishers are university presses or small non-profit publishers who also face budget challenges. Additionally, publishing a monograph, the “extremely important” scholarly communication vehicle for humanists,4 is much more costly than publishing a journal article. Because the stakeholders and the economics are different in Humanities publishing, the methods used thus far by libraries to reduce expenditures will not work to advance the kind of changes needed in the Humanities. If libraries scale back their spending, or collectively negotiate to spend less, university and small presses will have fewer resources to publish the content. A different mindset must be employed here. One that creates investments in partnerships and collective action between libraries and Humanities publishers.

Because they’re both based within the academy, libraries and university presses have aligned values which make them ideal collaborators. Both want to support scholars/authors in their knowledge production. Both want to disseminate access to these works and make the materials fully accessible. Both are working to steward university resources effectively and responsibly. Both are limited in their efforts by the support they receive from their institutions. Despite being able to view each other through a vendor/customer relationship lens, their success depends upon changing viewpoints and approaches.

The BIG Collection’s goal to enable and foster community centered scholarship is inclusive of university presses being part of that community. In establishing new consortia agreements for Humanities content, libraries and university presses need to make the deals mutually financially sustainable in order to make the scholarship discoverable and findable, accessible and usable, and well preserved. Open access publishing fits within this mindset perfectly because of the expanded access it provides, while also bringing more readership to Humanities’ fields that are becoming more marginalized. Aligning our organizations to facilitate the work of creating open collections fits within our shared values and facilitates the accomplishment, individually, of our purposes. Greater collaboration is needed. Libraries and presses must work together to create sustainable frameworks.

Libraries must collaborate to make investments and share expertise. Presses must work together to build collections that require less investment overhead for libraries.

The Big Ten Open Books project exemplifies this strategy and is the basis for the collaboration between the libraries and university presses within the BTAA consortium. The Big Ten Open Books’ first collection of 100 open access titles from six different university presses, funded by all BTAA libraries, was published in August 2023. Together, these organizations have the combined expertise necessary to work on Humanities publishing challenges including:

• Developing a business model that supports the creation of open access editions.

• Processing backlist title copyrights to make the works open access.

• Tracking usage data to understand the impact of the content.

• Ensuring the works are fully accessible and preserved; and

• engaging the readers with the works.

Big Ten Open Books is making an impact. Already, in the first five months after publication of the open access editions, these 100 books have been downloaded (either in whole or in part) over 38,000 times.5

The vision for the BIG Collection requires new approaches to support greater and continued access to Humanities’ publications. Collective action among libraries is starting to happen, but the collaborations must expand to include more values-aligned librarians and publishers to sustainably support Humanities scholars in both the production of knowledge and ensuring broad access to important scholarship. This collaborative vision illustrates a future of open access monograph publishing that addresses shared pain points through shared expertise and investment.

Endnotes

1. Lorcan Dempsey, Constance Malpas, and Mark Sandler. Operationalizing the BIG Collective Collection: A Case Study of Consolidation vs Autonomy. (Dublin, OH: OCLC Research, 2019) https://doi.org/10.25333/jbz3-jy57

2. Joshua Kim, “3 Questions on Academic Library Budgets for an Assessment and Planning Librarian” Inside Higher Ed , January 31, 2023. https://www.insidehighered. com/blogs/learning-innovation/3-questions-academiclibrary-budgets-assessment-and-planning-librarian

3. Rick Lugg, “Remarkable Acceleration of Shared-Print,” OCLC Blog Next, March 1, 2018, https://blog.oclc.org/ next/the-remarkable-acceleration-of-shared-print/

4. Rick Anderson and Karin Wulf. “Whither (or Whether) the Monograph? Karin Wulf and Rick Anderson Discuss Some Recent Research.” The Scholarly Kitchen. October 17, 2019. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/10/17/ whither-or-whether-the-monograph-karin-wulf-andrick-anderson-discuss-some-recent-research/

5. “Big Ten Open Books Impact and Usage.” 1/9/2024. https://bigtenopenbooks.org/impact