In an era when academic libraries face existential threats, from federal funding cuts to vendor consolidation to capacity crises, who steps up to provide stability? Our new research points to library consortia emerging as critical architects of resilience, evolving their missions and reshaping the open infrastructure landscape in the process.
Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) is pleased to release Open Resilience: Building Infrastructure Together (ORBIT), a landscape scan of how U.S.-based library consortia are engaging with open infrastructure (OI) to strengthen research, scholarly communication, and open science.
US-based library consortia provide an essential collaborative framework that enables academic institutions to achieve preservation, access, innovation, and educational goals that would be impossible individually. The report reveals that library consortia are stepping up as critical bulwarks against resource scarcity and service disruption among their members. Interviews with consortial leaders highlight both the urgent challenges they face—vendor consolidation, shrinking institutional capacity, and political and financial pressures—and the opportunities they see for bold collective action.
Key themes explored in the report include:
- Providing a safety net: How consortia are helping members survive budget cuts and staffing shortages.
- Cultivating mission-driven communities: Acting as conveners, connectors, and capacity-builders as well as service providers.
- Building resilient open infrastructure models: Sharing governance, risk, and expertise across institutions.
- Embracing interoperability: Ensuring access to knowledge while resisting vendor lock-in and consolidation.
The report also identifies five high-potential avenues for collective investment in open infrastructure—hosting, building, sponsoring, training, and cultivating—that could transform how libraries support open at scale.
An invitation to collective action
This research emerges from IOI's broader work with networks as catalysts for open infrastructure adoption worldwide. We see library consortia as uniquely positioned to accelerate this transformation, because they’ve built a deep understanding of the communities they serve and they understand the power of collective action and shared responsibility.
We invite consortial leaders to consider how these findings might inform your strategic planning and partnership opportunities. The challenges are real, but so are the concrete examples of collaborative approaches that are already working. We also invite individual libraries, whether you're part of a consortium or considering joining one, to explore how these emerging models of shared infrastructure and collective action might strengthen your own work.
Continue the conversation
The findings in ORBIT represent the beginning of a conversation, not the end. We're eager to hear from consortium leaders, library administrators, and open infrastructure advocates about their experiences, challenges, and ideas for collective action—contact us at research [at] investinopen [dot] org.