Call for Participation for NISO CCLIP Project Working Groups

Following its grant award from IMLS to support the Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project (“CCLP”), NISO announces that the work item for the Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Infrastructure Project Recommended Practice (“CCLIP”) has been approved by its Voting Members.

Networks of libraries have a long tradition of working together to expand their resources and provide more comprehensive coverage across all subjects through sharing of resources. As one of these strategies, larger networks of institutions have recently explored wider adoption of cooperative collections management, which this project defines as a process by which networks of institutions work collaboratively to acquire, manage, circulate, and preserve collections across the network. The CCLP seeks to overcome serious barriers to wider implementations, including the lack of available vendor-neutral interoperable systems, adequate governance and decision-making frameworks, and assessment tools.

The CCLIP Recommended Practice will document exchange protocols that describe gathering, normalizing, and exchanging holdings information, contractual information, retention obligations, and usage data. It will also describe aggregation of library staff and subject matter expertise, local and group-based insights, and the publisher/marketplace information necessary to support collaborative decisions at the local and cross-institutional levels. The Recommended Practice will also explore assessment processes among partner institutions, provide definitions, describe personas, and outline their related workflows.

CCLIP will support several working groups to work in concert with CCLP and with each other. At this time, NISO is forming three initial working groups, which are expected to start work in early March 2023. Other CCLIP working groups will be formed later in the project to focus on additional elements of the overall Recommended Practice, such as cataloging and metadata, assessment, and partner interactions. These groups will form later in 2023 and 2024, per the overall project’s work plan.

We invite statements of interest from libraries, content and service providers, and other experts to participate on working groups for:

• Collections development and selection
• Infrastructure
• Organizational Strategy and Governance

The Collections Development and Selection working group will develop use cases, user stories, and recommendations for processes to be used across institutions in collections, by investigating and discussing current gaps and documenting data requirements and needed functionality. It is expected to operate for about a year. NISO seeks participation from heads and directors of collection development, selectors, collection analysts, and strategists.

The Infrastructure working group will develop requirements for CCLP prototype middleware and applications specifications, examining existing tools to identify necessary functionality and user needs. It is expected to operate for about 16 months. NISO seeks participation from library systems managers, product and software developers, and product managers.

The Organizational Strategy and Governance working group will develop recommendations for how collections lifecycle activities should operate strategically and be governed across different institutions in a common infrastructure. It is expected to be underway for about 10 months. NISO seeks participation from deans and directors of libraries and collections analysts and strategists.

We anticipate that on average all working groups will meet virtually via Zoom twice a month for one-hour meetings. About 2–3 hours of offline work/month will be anticipated in addition to meetings. Working group members will be expected to collect or create reference materials, analyze them through discussion, and collaboratively draft new outputs as part of their tasks. There may be additional methods or tools that working groups develop to support project outputs.  More details about the working groups’ scopes are available here. 

Please send a short email with a sentence or two describing your interest and which working group you’d like to participate in to nisohq@niso.org.

NISO held a webinar on January 24, 2023 at 2 pm Eastern to discuss the CCLP project and the working groups. You may email nisohq@niso.org to receive the recording, or view the embedded video here.