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.