Development of the Plowshares Library Collaborative

The Grant

In the fall of 2002, Earlham, Goshen, and Manchester College libraries began implementing their portion of the “Plowshares Project: A Collaboration in Peace Studies by Three Indiana Colleges,” made possible by a grant from the Lilly Endowment.

The grant acknowledged that “our libraries are at the heart of peace studies as an intellectual enterprise and, therefore, as we develop the Plowshares program, we also need to develop the information resources that support it.” Since each library already held materials supporting its campus’ peace studies curriculum, as well as archival materials emphasizing each campus’ faith tradition (Quaker, Mennonite, and Brethren), there was a strong foundation on which to build and improve the collections.

The grant included the following library activities:

Preparing a core list of peace studies materials for undergraduates
Creating a cooperative acquisitions policy
Creating an online resource directory
Publishing annotated bibliographies on peace studies topics by faculty
Digitizing peace-related archival documents
Improving interlibrary loan access to our materials

Beginnings

Plowshares librarians, library directors and archivists held their first “library summit” on September 12, 2003 at Manchester College. To begin work on their assigned tasks, they created three committees. The Collection Analysis Committee was formed to work with the results of the OCLC collection analysis (see below) and to develop a cooperative collection development policy. The Web Site Committee was asked to work on design and content for the online resource directory. The Digitization Committee broke into two subgroups. The Content Group would identify holdings from the respective archives for inclusion in the digitization project, and the Technology Group would investigate options for scanning material and delivering our digitized data. In order to facilitate inter-campus communication among all participants, one of the librarians set up an electronic mailing list.

Videoconferencing

Librarians, library directors and archivists met every two to four months from the fall of 2003 until December 2005. In April, 2004 they held their first videoconference. This saved considerable travel time and served the purposes of reporting and decision-making adequately. These meetings provided technical staff with the opportunity to fine tune the videoconferencing equipment, which was new to all three colleges.

Collection Analysis and Development

The first task librarians undertook was a collection analysis, using the Automated Collection Assessment and Analysis Service (ACAS) of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). This involved a total of nine libraries at eight colleges and universities with undergraduate peace studies majors. Plowshares library directors chose key words to search in author, title, notes and subject fields of all these libraries’ online records. The assessment eventually resulted in lists of titles shared by five, six, seven, and eight or nine of the libraries, lists that could be valuable to libraries interested in beginning or building their peace studies holdings.

On each campus. The collection analysis results provided one way to increase the depth of peace studies materials on each campus as librarians chose to add titles from these lists according to their own criteria. Librarians also collected peace studies course syllabi and supplemental reading lists in order to aid in collection development and to make sure that their libraries included the faculty-selected reading list materials in their holdings.

In collaboration. The Collection Analysis Committee examined numerous cooperative collection development policies before deciding what best suited the Plowshares collaborative. The Cooperative Collection Development Policy was approved by the Plowshares librarians in February 2005.

The Collection Analysis Committee also examined periodical and database holdings at each institution to see what might be shared more broadly. Electronic database subscriptions, however, already benefited from consortial pricing. The shared ILL system enabled adequate access to any periodical from various locations, without adding another transportation system between the Plowshares campuses. The committee did determine that the loss of availability of a periodical title within the state of Indiana would possibly slow the ILL delivery of its contents; therefore, they decided to include in the policy that librarians at the Plowshares colleges would check the subscriptions and holdings of PALNI and statewide libraries before canceling a periodical that may have relevance to one of the peace studies programs.

Virtual Peace Studies Library

The Web Site Committee developed the Virtual Peace Studies Library web pages to house resources generated by the collaborative. It includes both subject resources in peace studies and resources for undergraduate peace studies education.

Bibliographies

A librarian from each institution, working with other Plowshares staff, solicited and invited topic-specific bibliographic essays and annotated reviews to be included with the resources in the Virtual Peace Studies Library. These will be posted as they are completed.

Webliographies

Librarians from each institution developed webliographies on peace studies education, as well as on peace studies-related topics. Each author is responsible for updating the webliographies he or she posted.

Archival Digitization

In February 2004, the Technology Group of the Digitization Committee presented comparisons of a digital repository and collection management system for eventual hosting and searching of digitized collections. Given that each institution had such different needs in terms of its items and digitizing situations, librarians decided that each library would “choose a tool that suits its needs as long as the tools we choose are compatible with one another and give each library access to the digital holdings of the others.” Librarians also decided that Dublin Core would be the metadata standard for the digitized Plowshares collection. Despite the “go your own way” early decision, the PALNI consortium agreed to host CONTENTdm on their server, providing support services and a shared funding structure for ongoing maintenance, which resulted in the three Plowshares libraries deciding to post their digitized archival collections there.

Plowshares funds and a PALNI Lilly grant helped Plowshares libraries obtain the needed scanning and optical character recognition equipment and services.
Librarians created a list of Plowshares categories for searching and browsing, specific to the content included in this project.

The specific content digitized for inclusion varied from institution to institution but was unified in that the collection would contain documentation of the peace commitment of the three peace churches contained in the three libraries’ archives. Earlham and Manchester included periodicals, while Goshen did not. Earlham was the only library to include images. The digitized collections, which continue to grow, became available online to the public during the spring of 2007.

Interlibrary Loan

The grant enabled Manchester and Goshen Colleges to install the Ariel document delivery system, assuring the fastest turnaround time for ILL periodical requests among our libraries, as well as other libraries in the system. (Earlham College was already using Ariel before the grant began.)

Grant Extension and Evaluation

During the fall of 2005, librarians submitted plans for use of a no-cost extension granted by Lilly before the end of the year. The grant was extended until June 2008. In this extension period the library activities will focus on (1) revising and updating the web site, (2) completing the implementation of the digital collections, (3) planning for fund raising to extend the work of the collaborative, (4) working with the Plowshares faculty to enhance the web site and (5) continuing support of the peace and justice curriculum through collection development, information literacy instruction, reference and research services.

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