Guiding Principles for Collaboration in a New Library Management System

Together, the 30 USG Libraries have over 7 million unique titles (over 17 million volumes) available to students, faculty, researchers, and our global community of learners (in addition to our GALILEO resources). The USG vision of “One Statewide Library” allows for an extensive, yet efficient collection in times of increasing library costs and economic constraints. The following principles should guide the investigations, discussions, and recommendations related to how we implement our next system and how we work together to ensure a core collection of resources and services needed for teaching, learning, and research at all USG institutions.

• Power of collaboration
• Collaboration provides the most significant opportunity to improve library services for our students, faculty, and staff.
• Change at this point needs to be transformative
• Reduce the duplication of work across the system, and enable staff to work more efficiently.
• Manage all materials in the same interface and workflows
• Integrate the processing of electronic, digital, and print materials into the new system and eliminate the duplicate data entry required by disparate systems.
• Rethink workflows to gain efficiencies
• Take advantage of next generation system capabilities to design better workflows and update out-of-date practices.
• Eliminate redundancies, so we can deliver cost effective services and reallocate scarce resources to other priorities.
• Take time to explore and consider new workflows. Be open to new approaches and innovative solutions.
• Look beyond the individual library for efficiencies
• Take full advantage of shared systems.
• A shared bibliographic file (Alma Network Zone) will provide the greatest opportunity and flexibility for sharing resources and sharing services.
• Use configuration options for consortia that facilitate sharing data, sharing resources, and sharing services and avoid duplication of effort.
• Where possible, use a common set of policies across the system.
• The Orbis Cascade Alliance has stated this focus extremely well:

  Do things once
  Do things the same
  Do things together

• Facilitate/enhance resource sharing across GIL, beyond GIL, and as practical beyond Georgia


• Facilitate integration with other campus and USG systems (authentication, financial, learning management, etc.)


• Focus on best practices, library standards, and ongoing staff development

RACL agreed on these at the June 23, 2015 online meeting.