The Texas Council of State University Librarians met in Austin September 25 and 26, joined by the Texas Community College and Junior College Librarians (TCCJCL) and Texas Independent College and University Librarians (TICUL). The main topic under consideration was TexShare and the future of academic library resource sharing in Texas. The following articles comprise the trio of reports heard by librarians at that meeting. The first, by State Librarian Robert Martin, is a report on the status of TexShare and a suggestion for its future direction. The second is a summary of the report by William Potter of the University of Georgia on the ambitious GALILEO project. Finally, Harold Billings ponders the implications of the path we have chosen.
TexShare in Transition
Robert S. Martin
I am confident that everyone in the academic library community in Texas is familiar with the TexShare library resource sharing program, and equally confident that you all know that it is in the middle of a major transformation. What I intend to do here is to report briefly on what is happening with TexShare, and then open a discussion on the future of the program—a discussion that I expect to continue long after today.
The 75th Legislature enacted House Bill 2721, relating to the TexShare library resource sharing program. The bill had three major elements. First, it established TexShare in statute. Heretofore, TexShare had been operated as a program of the Higher Education Coordinating Board and funded through a simple line item appropriation in the Coordinating Board’s budget. Establishing the program in statute gives it a sense of permanence and stability that it had lacked.
Second, the bill expanded the program to serve not only the 52 state-supported four-year and graduate universities—the members of TCSUL—but also the public junior and community college libraries, and the private and independent colleges and universities throughout the state, the members of TCCJCL and TICUL. This more than tripled the size of the program.
Third, the bill transferred the administration of TexShare from the Coordinating Board to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. The statute also provided a governance structure and authorized a number of specific functions and activities. It established a nine-member Advisory Board, made up of representatives from the various classes of consortium membership, as well as the general public. It specifically authorized the Commission to establish administrative rules governing various aspects of the program, and established authority for the Commission to contract with other entities to carry out the purposes of the program.
Two other key components relating to the new TexShare also came out of the legislative appropriations process. The $493,600 appropriated to the Coordinating Board for TexShare was transferred to the Library and Archives Commission, and augmented by $500,000. An additional $105,000 of funding administered by the Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund Board was earmarked for equipment. And the Commission was authorized to add two FTE in staffing to carry out the TexShare program. This means that the Commission has about $1 million each year of the biennium and two staff persons to work on TexShare development.
Achieving the increased appropriations and the basic staffing level was by no means an easy or straightforward task. In the atmosphere of "downsizing" state government that prevailed in the legislative session, getting any additional resources was an uphill struggle. The effort was successful only due to the extraordinary hard work of a lot of library loyalists, including Mark Smith of the Texas Library Association and Norman Hood of the Independent Colleges and Universities of Texas. We owe them, and everyone else who worked on this effort, a genuine expression of gratitude.
Of course, the idea of resource sharing is not something new to the Texas State Library. For many years we have been working with public libraries to enhance the sharing of library resources, and this has become one of the major focuses of the agency’s programs. The TexNet Interlibrary Loan program has provided the structure and infrastructure for traditional modes of library resource sharing in the state for many years. The advent of the Texas Group has enhanced this effort through the application of OCLC networking. In recent years we have been providing access to an increasing array of information resources via the Texas State Electronic Library, including licenses to commercial database products similar to the products provided through TexShare. Through the Texas State Publications Clearinghouse we have also worked to share the important resources available in the form of state agency publications. Last year, pursuant to a legislative mandate to index state agency publications in electronic form, we developed the Texas Records and Information Locator (TRAIL) to enhance access to state agency information resources of all kinds.
Adding TexShare to this mix resulted in the creation of a critical mass of programs related to resource sharing in the Texas State Library. Our response to this has been to reorganize the structure of the agency, creating a new division to handle all of the resource-sharing programs. This new Library Resource Sharing Division will have responsibility for all of the programs described above: TexNet Interlibrary Loan program, the Texas State Electronic Library, TRAIL, and the Publications Clearinghouse, as well as TexShare. In this way we can hope to achieve some synergy and some economies of scale. We have also made some other changes in the organizational structure, moving some personnel dealing with technical support for information systems to the Information Resource Technologies division, and staff managing contracts administration to the Administrative Services unit.
Our principal focus for the coming weeks will be recruiting a director for the Library Resource Sharing Division. We are looking for a dynamic and experienced professional to lead the way in the formulation of resource sharing strategies for Texas. And we are counting on the assistance of the academic library community in the state to help us recruit the right person.
I view the future of TexShare over the coming two years as evolutionary. Our goals for this period are to minimize the changes the charter members of the TexShare consortium will perceive in the services that they receive, while simultaneously maximizing the benefits received by the new members. This will be extremely difficult to achieve, given the high level of expectations and the limited amount of resources to achieve the goals of the program. We feel that the only way it is at all possible is by maintaining as much as possible the continuity of the management of the TexShare program. We expect, therefore, to keep in place the existing Management Team. We will also retain the existing Working Groups, which have been the backbone of the TexShare program, although we will need to reconfigure these working groups to include representatives of the new TexShare member institutions. And we anticipate no significant changes in the programs offered through TexShare during this transitional period.
Since assuming responsibility for TexShare on September 1, our first step was to appoint the new Advisory Board, as mandated by statute. I am very proud of the elite group of individuals whom we have persuaded to take on this daunting task. The new Advisory Board members are:
Public members (2):
The second thing we did was to arrange for the management of the program during the 1998 Fiscal Year. In order to maximize continuity of the program, we decided to continue contracting with the UT General Libraries/AMIGOS partnership to manage TexShare and to provide for the necessary infrastructure and technical support. We issued an invitation to bid in August, and awarded the contract in early September.
The next thing that we must accomplish in the TexShare transition is to arrange for the new members of the consortium, the community colleges and the private institutions, to begin receiving the benefits of the programs. This will begin on or about November 1, when the electronic information products will become available to these members. The other TexShare programs—reciprocal borrowing privileges, the courier service, the grant programs, and others—will be phased in over the next several months.
Upcoming activities in the continuing transition will include reconstituting the Working Groups to include representatives of the community colleges and the private institutions, and the first meeting of the new Advisory Board. The principal focus for the Advisory Board, the Management Team, and the Working Groups for the coming year will be to work on the continuing evolution of the TexShare program.
What is next for TexShare? The major focus, it seems to me, once the initial transition has been completed, is to develop ways to provide enhancement, enrichment and depth to the knowledge and information resources that we can share via networked digital information technology. One possibility is to arrange for consortial subscriptions to electronic journals, as has been done by the OhioLink, UIC, and others. We also need to work on developing digital surrogate collections of the rich treasures of traditional materials that fill the stacks of the TexShare member institutions. Ultimately, however, the answer to the question "What’s next?" must come from you, the members of the TexShare consortium. It is your program. It is for you to decide where it will go, how it will grow, and what services it will provide to the libraries of the state. You decide. I invite you to join in a continuing dialog as we all attempt to struggle with the issues, to define and develop this important program.