The explosive growth of remote access electronic resources (e-resources)

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Notes on OperationsThe Columbia and Cornell University Libraries' partnership (2CUL) A key component of the broad-based collaboration between the Columbia and Cornell University Libraries, known as 2CUL, was to have been the integration of the central technical services operations of both institutions.2 This project, initially called 2CUL Technical Services Integration (TSI) and funded by a generous three-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aimed to create a single, unified, and deeply collaborative operation that would support the broader goals of 2CUL by means of 1. a reconception of the institutions' separate library operations to achieve integration across both campuses by realigning staff responsibilities, workflows, and reporting lines; and 2. a transformation of the vision, priorities, and values of both libraries' technical services to support the overall institutional goals for 2CUL and to view institutional collaboration as fundamental to regular library operations. 3The libraries anticipated that the savings in staff time and effort in the integrated technical services divisions would create additional capacity for new or previously unrealized projects and initiatives. The 2CUL TSI steering committee devoted the first year of TSI planning to creating an administrative infrastructure and encouraging staff buy-in to support the integration. They appointed ten working groups consisting of middle managers and other key staff to represent major functional areas of the two libraries' technical services operations. They charged these functional working groups to compile inventories of each unit's staff, expertise, policies, practices, and workflows; to exchange information regarding reporting and decision-making structures and The authors wish to thank the 2CUL Project Directors, Xin Li (Cornell) and Robert Wolven (Columbia), and fellow TSI JSMIN members, Adam Chandler (Cornell) and Robert Rendall (Columbia), for their input on a draft version of this article. They would also like to thank those (too numerous to mention here) who participated directly in the TSI project for their support and contributions to the work described in the following pages.

The Columbia and Cornell University Libraries’ partnership is now in its fourth year. Its composite acronym (2CUL), which condenses a doubling of the two participating libraries’ initial letters, in itself reflects the very nature of the collaboration’s strategic purpose: a broad integration of library activities in a number of areas – including collection development, acquisitions and cataloging, e-resources and digital management, and digital preservation. In what is perhaps their boldest, most ambitious 2CUL initiative to date, the two libraries have begun planning for and have taken the first steps towards an integration of their substantial technical services operations. In this paper, the authors outline the goals of 2CUL Technical Services Integration (TSI), report on the first phase of the work, reflect on what they have learned so far in planning for this operational union, and look forward to the next steps of the project in which the two institutions will initiate incrementally the functional integration of the two divisions. The period covered in Phase 1 of TSI is September 2012-December 2013.

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