Library Consortia and the CIC: Leveraging Scale for Collaborative Success

Consortia distinguish themselves not only by their membership, but by the shared vision of those members to accomplish something greater than any could do alone. Now more than ever, the opportunity to develop significant collaborations exists in a networked environment. The emergence of supraregional efforts such as the HathiTrust Digital Library, the arXiv e-Print Archive, and the Google Book Project are successes in large-scale collaboration. Through descriptions of these services within the context of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), in addition to discussions of the evolution of traditional services such as resource sharing, this article explores the changing consortial environment and discusses the continued value of library consortia that are able to adapt to the changing priorities of their members.