Home | Co-operation and Partnerships (Summary)
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SCOPE

Issues dealt with in this guideline include: 
Strategic partnerships
Types of partnership
Initiating partnerships
Organisation of partnerships
Maintenance of partnerships

POLICY ISSUES

In some countries e.g. USA, UK a culture of partnership has become an important part of government policy. The need to consider public needs in a more ‘holistic’ context, supported by many governments and the EU, increasingly means that public libraries need to work together with other local authority departments, agencies and local and regional offices of central government as well as with their cultural partners such as museums and archives. 

There is increasingly a demand for services which no single institution can provide in a given geographical area: partnerships are needed to add cost-effectively to the range of services available to the public or to provide a way of maintaining and developing services where funds are insufficient.

The advent of networked services and the nature of digital content in cyberspace is a further powerful force in the dissolution of organisational barriers and the need for public libraries to take an open and innovative approach to co-operation and partnership. By entering partnerships, public libraries can find funding for innovation and development and acquire access to skills which traditionally are not to be found among public library staff. 

GOOD PRACTICE GUIDELINES 

A partnership is a means to an end. Partnerships usually come into being because participants see them as an effective way of furthering their aims and objectives. Partnerships succeed when all participants both benefit and contribute. For public libraries, an effective partnership is one which results in clear and measurable benefits to its users.

Potential partners for public libraries
Various types of co-operation and partnership are effective in delivering different types of objective:

Strategic partnerships can be established at national, regional or local levels. At national level, strategic partnerships can be designed to carry out important national programmes for specific purposes e.g. The People's Network in the United Kingdom is a project to connect all public libraries to the Internet, as part of the Government's commitment to give everyone in the UK the opportunity to get online.

At regional level, strategic partnerships may be formed in order to:

• Establish a development agency for museum, library and archive organisations facilitating the sector's development across a region through leadership, advocacy, advice, obtaining funding, developing new bids and exemplar projects; and service delivery. In some cases, regional co-operation may initially be limited to public libraries.

• Deliver objectives such as the creation of a regional broadband public library network; the development and delivery of electronic content; reskilling the library workforce; promoting literature and reader development; and providing opportunities for lifelong learning to local and regional communities.

• Represent the interests of the three domains within a regional and strategic context, dealing with: government and government agencies; regional political and executive bodies; national and regional professional bodies; education bodies; local authorities; and the voluntary sector.

To succeed, regional strategic bodies need to work in partnership with their member organisations and other stakeholders, recognising the priorities and needs of individual services and local autonomy. 

Partnerships between public libraries and other libraries
Groups (or ‘clumps’) of libraries, typically public libraries and academic libraries, may agree to co-operate in areas such as consortium purchase of resources (particularly electronic resources), digitisation of key resources and the provision of access through a common website, gateway or retrieval service e.g. by linking their catalogues together. 

Partnerships with the voluntary sector 
Public libraries may benefit from partnerships with the voluntary sector and NGOs through their commitment to and understanding of the needs of specific target groups, e.g. elderly people, disabled people, community groups and ethnic minorities, 

Partnerships with industry
Telecommunications providers need to sell services running over the infrastructure in which they have invested and which will help them generate the revenues they need for a sustainable commercial future. Bandwidth is often purchased by local or regional authorities or consortia to deliver a variety of the services. Content can be seen as a key driver for developing a market for broadband, so it is in the interests of the telecommunications companies to encourage the digitisation of content by libraries, museums and archives. The possibility of joint investment in services by public library authorities and telecommunications organisations, on the basis that risk and income could be shared, requires exploration. 

Types of partnership 
There are a number of types and purposes for partnerships:

• regional or location based - where organisations in a given locality agree to co-operate; 

• subject based where groups of organisations specialising in a particular subject, regardless of location, agree to work together;

• activity-based partnership, which include:
  – Service delivery. Jointly bidding for and developing Information Society projects, services supporting the lifelong learning agenda etc
  
  – Training, for example IT training and management training. The scope may include: identifying and implementing opportunities for co-operative ventures in staff training and development; discussing common problems and solutions and promoting best practice; organising joint training events and mentoring activities; identifying opportunities for sharing training resources and the joint purchase of training materials; and setting up staff exchanges 
  
  – IT development partnerships can support improvements in the range of services offered by a library, for example by sharing electronic resources and providing electronic access to catalogues and databases - working co-operatively towards the development of the virtual library. 
  
  – Purchasing partnerships and consortia have become widespread and influential, especially in the academic library sector. They are seen as an important means of providing better value for money from library budgets by achieving discounts through negotiating bulk purchase and common licensing arrangements, especially for electronic publications. Publishers and suppliers also benefit from consortia through savings in marketing, guaranteed market share and exposure for their products. They are helpful in the development of common collection development policies and the avoidance of wasteful fragmentation in purchasing policy. Consortia can enter into negotiations with suppliers from a position of strength. They may be international in scope (see EIFL).
  
  – Preservation of unique materials, which may be done co-operatively in order to pool expertise and avoid duplication of effort. A preservation programme requires concerned and informed staff, accurate data, adequate funding, appropriate standards, preservation policies and procedures, and mechanisms for sharing information and access. (See also digitisation)
  
  – Project partnerships are often necessary when applying for external funding in a competitive arena e.g. EC research programmes, which often stipulate a minimum number of partners, who must be drawn from a minimum number of members or candidate states.
  
  – Funding partnerships (see funding)

Home | Co-operation and Partnerships (Summary)
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