The objective of this book is to provide a comprehensive and broad review of all the elements that lead to mergers and other alliances by libraries, and the methods used by librarians and others when they attempt to ensure that such collaborations are effective and successful. The editors distinguish between full mergers and acquisitions and the “less risky but equally dramatic” activities of collaborations, partnerships and joint ventures (p. 13). Some lessons are drawn from the for-profit sector, but most of the chapters here relate to non-profit libraries.
The first two chapters are perhaps the most useful for the general reader. In Chapter 1, David Jank has provided a meta-analysis of the literature to determine what practitioners and scholars have found to be the most important factors in the area of technology project management and Web-based initiatives. After using a variety of methods, he developed a taxonomy of topics and themes relating to collaboration. He has uncovered five key areas – and they are not all what one might intuitively have expected. Chapter 2 is on lessons from the corporate world: culture and communication play very significant roles in both success and failure.
The book includes chapters on original research, case studies, literature reviews and conceptual papers. Subjects include structural and operational mergers in the USA, and also on the rapid changes in Finnish higher education resulting in merged and joint library operations; a review of lessons of successful and unsuccessful mergers in the corporate sector; experiences of collaboration in higher education in library and information science programmes in the USA, Europe and the Middle East by multi-university efforts that adhere to the Bologna Process; the collapse and mergers of former OCLC regional networks in the USA; the financial savings from network acquisition of electronic resources and databases; the impact of efforts such as those by the Council on Library and Information Resources to encourage collaboration amongst libraries and various similar agencies; the results in Greece of radical fiscal constraints after the euro crash that led to contraction and collaboration among university libraries there.
There is another volume to follow in the Advances in Librarianship series on the operational view of mergers and alliances. Both are surely good reading for managers who are willing to look for new ways to reinvigorate their organisations.
