Maurice York
Director of Library Initiatives
Big Ten Academic Alliance
Karla Strieb
Visiting Program Director for Shared Collections
Big Ten Academic Alliance
The Big Ten Academic Alliance libraries have made meaningful progress working collectively to lay the foundation for bringing a tremendous vision into tangible reality: uniting their individual collections into a functional single collection—jointly managed and fully integrated. The BIG Collection comprehends a collection of resources, both print and digital. It is also a collection of technologies, infrastructures, people, and expertise. It is less a “destination” than a way of being, and a way of operating with increasing interdependence—a paradigm shift from being separate owners and actors who share with each other to being joint stewards of a single, distinctive collection that stretches geographically from coast to coast and (in the print realm) includes more than a quarter of the published titles in North America. The Alliance needs new systems at scale to enable this shift, accompanied by new agreements, new policies, new ways of understanding, as well as new ways of perceiving and analyzing services and collections—all rooted in the fundamental principles of equity and justice. The session will characterize the overarching nature of the strategy for advancing this paradigm shift and, by looking at the use cases of shared print and open publishing, dive deeper into some of the specifics of systems, scale, data, and collaborative work that accompany it.