Stronger Together at the Big Ten: Library Publishing Collective Action

Abstract

Tasked with serving extremely large populations, with limited resources and little chance of realizing increased capacities, the Big Ten Academic Alliance libraries are realizing opportunities to work together through collective action. With a goal of strengthening our work, and expanding our capacity, the library publishers of the Big Ten Academic Alliance have aligned our resources in order to build a cooperative, aggregated collection of BTAA-published works on the Next Generation Library Publishing’s Meru platform. The short term goal of this project is to evaluate Meru’s capacity to support the display of a variety of publication types, regardless of the platform they were created on. The longer term goals are to determine Meru’s capacity to produce metadata for all publications (or selected publications) for use in discovery systems and preservation systems, and to identify options for the Alliance to work at scale. At this presentation, members of the project team will share information about the functionality of Meru and the process used to ingest content from Janeway, OJS, DSpace, and Pressbooks into a unified, structured display layer. The interactive, community engaged process used to identify the common product requirements, and to evaluate the implemented multi-publisher display platform will also be explored. We will also outline our efforts to assess the potential for reusing the newly compiled, aggregated publication data for discovery (via third party vendors such as ExLibris, EBSCO, and OAPEN), preservation (via third party vendors, Portico and CLOCKSS), and accessibility testing. These activities will be shared within the context of the challenges and opportunities present when bringing together disparate programs; We aim to identify our differences in order to strengthen all our publishing programs and see what synergy comes from working together.