Library and Information Science Commons^™

What Collaboration Means To Me: Library Collaboration Is Hard; Effective Collaboration Is Harder, Lorcan Dempsey

Collaborative Librarianship

In this short piece I argue that library collaboration is very important, so important that it needs to be a more deliberate strategic focus for libraries and the organizations that support them. This is especially so in a network environment, where scale is important in creating efficiencies and impact. Despite this importance, effective collaboration is hard and current arrangements are suboptimal. I discuss various reasons why this is so, and offer some suggestions for how matters might be improved.