Episode 3: All about Consortia
In Episode 3 of the Common Stacks Podcast, Heather and Rob look at the work consortia do, why they benefit libraries, how they support publishers, and bring out some "good old days" stories of their own work in consortia over the course of decades.
Common Stacks Episode 3: All About Libarary Consortia Transcript
Heather:
Welcome to the common stacks podcast. This is the show that brings together professionals from within the library world, as well as interesting experts to engage in discussions around issues, acting libraries, looking at the ways in which libraries are dispelling the myth of, “this is how we've always done it.” I'm Heather and there's Rob and we know some stuff. And that's what we're gonna talk about today is the stuff that we know. And there's always this interesting conversation of how people got into libraries, because most people fell into libraries through interesting stories and very few people just set out and like, "I'm gonna go into libraries." So we can talk about that. And we can also share some of the things that we've seen over the past decades in the library industry and some of the lessons that we've learned as we embark on some new projects, I think would be helpful. So are you up for that Rob?
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Rob:
Absolutely great topic. This is an industry that involves a lot of characters, but I feel like the characters are the same or similar. This is an industry that keeps people employed for a really long time. I've always enjoyed the librarians, talking with them. They're always welcome. And I remember early on going into libraries, the greeting that you would get and the introduction and the pride in the library, taking a tour and realizing that was really important to libraries. And it took me a little while to figure that out. But then I started to ask questions and really get involved and really understand that the building was their identity, and they cherished the building and taking tours of it and, and learning about it was, was really fun. And unfortunately it doesn't happen anymore and we're so rushed and I missed those days. Those were a lot of fun.
Heather:
Also with COVID now, so many of the libraries still aren't aren't open. So hopefully in the next couple years we can get back to doing regular library tours. How did you get into libraries?
Rob:
The DNA route? My mom was a librarian. She started out as a corporate librarian. Then she moved into the state system, I think in CUNY for a bunch of years. Then she went into the some private schools and she finally ended her career as a library director within the SUNY system in New York state. I had been in libraries all my life as a little kid. I was dragged, not the right word. I was brought to the library often and roamed around and enjoyed the facility and the staircases and the smells, and off-limits going back behind closed doors and trying to find where the good lifesavers were and opening up the staff supply of candy and spending some dime on a Saturday or Sunday at the library. So I've been in this space for a very long time.
Rob:
I have a funny story early on at ALA when I just started out, I had started a conversation with a charming gentleman. He came into our booth and we were talking and he asked me a question, and I answered it honestly. And I realized that the delivery was really poor. And the question was, "how long have you been come mean to ALA?" And I answered, "honestly, 20 years." It's about how many years I was at ALA. And the gentleman seemed to believe that that answer was either not true, or I was trying to trick him in some capacity. And then I had to actually stop him and explain, "no, I'm a son of a librarian, and and as a little kid came to ALA many times." So, lots of stories about ALA and being taken with my family and going to hotels.
And back when parents felt comfortable putting younger kids on tour buses and mom saying, "Hey, I'll be back at five. See you then." That's how we got to know Philadelphia and Dallas and Denver in a lot of cities, my brother and I would just go on the bus and learn. And that's how we were connected to library. And it's been interesting to grow up in front of librarians too, to see a lot of colleagues retire and welcome the next generation of library in, but it's been a fabric of my life and I really enjoy the space and really want the profession to understand how much librarians have given to us and how much we want to give.
Heather:
Yeah.
Agreed. And so then you were in library sales before you joined a consortium.
Rob:
I was early on to software as a service hosted proxy server. At the time we would also install a server. We figured out which made the most sense we opted out of putting servers on campus. This was back when this thing called Y2K became a dominant software problem. The platform we were supporting wasn't robust enough at the time. And these were their early days of HTTP and the protocol. And there wasn't much stability in the solution we had. And it kind of pushed me out from selling technology to supporting libraries through a consortia opportunity. It was a good experience early on to see the range of price. And we were the first to the market, but then this guy out of Arizona created this thing called easy proxy. You're right. And talk about a product that really disrupted the space, opened up the door for libraries and closed the door for me in this particular space. So a little early tech, but I realized the content side of that had tremendous opportunity.
Heather:
And then you went on and ran WALDO for 22 years, right?
Rob:
We were a part of a team that supported the WALDO consortium for 22 years. And we had a staff of about nine people. It was a relationship where the consortium hired our business to operate and run their consortium. And it was a great experience. We met many people. We took a small academic informal consortium made up of the Westchester academic library directors organization, and grew it into a membership of over a thousand libraries in about 42 different states. Canada as well. And it was great. It was a lot of fun. It was the, the good years of the market, the growing years of the market, the funded years of the market. And there's tons of good stories in that 22 years.
Heather:
Well, I'm sure there are. I think there's something about library consortia that often people on both librarians and vendors don't necessarily know what consortium do. And obviously every consortium is a little bit different. Some focus on building software, or some focus just on vendor discounts or some focus on training. And some do try to do all of that. If you had to talk about what you think a consortium is explaining what you want to do or what you think a consortium would be to a vendor, to a vendor, that's the, let's talk about what you would explain it to a vendor. And then also what you would explain it to a library. So I'm a vendor. Tell me what a consortium is.
Rob:
A consortium really started out as the original original community builder. These were regional service per providers, supporting libraries through resources, from print to online, from technology to standalone servers, to shared servers to the cloud and consortium did this locally. They connected with your community locally. And to this day, you cannot reproduce that. It is a very basic, but a tremendous valuable service that consortia play. And it's not something that's duplicated. It's a service that's regional and libraries bring in different relationships. And the leadership in the consortium focus on different campaign strategies, engagements. They're doing a lot of things for libraries that nobody else is really doing. It's not a deliverable of ALA. It, it's not a deliver deliverable of their own entity and consortia fill this value strip. You might call it for libraries and they still do it today. Whether it's large, small, regional groups of five groups, of a thousand, what consortia do really can't be duplicated outside of that structure and outside of governance and support. They're very unique and they offer different value based upon what I think they do well in their space.
Heather:
I love that the original community builder, sometimes it, a consortium might spring up around a particular product. I'm thinking about the Green Mountain Library Consortium in Vermont that spring up around hosting eBooks or something I think, and then spread to other things. And, and then other times it's just a regional, they always were like that to do group buys, but it it's interesting, those kinds of differences in how you can create a community sometimes from, from nothing.
Rob:
And a unique community and their purpose differentiate, it was the unique need of their community <affirmative> and then services started to be brought in, in ideas and committees formed and collaborations formed, right? The roots of WALDO go back to the early eighties. And it was an informal group and they sat together. And if my history was right, it was a gentleman named ed O'Hare. It was a who was from the college of Mount St. Vincent Francine Costello from the Southern Westchester. It was somebody from the White Plains, public library, Sandy Miranda, and a few other colleagues in this space. And they were multi-type from day one mm-hmm <affirmative> and somewhere there's books and records of their early contracts. It's really interesting to see how this group operated informally, but decided to take on contracts and then switch over to a formal. And it'd be a great book there. There's lots of different stories about who started, why they started, whether they were O CLC backed. It's a tradition of that needs to be preserved and recorded.
Heather:
So that was what you had explained to a vendor. What about a librarian? Because I don't know that they really teach much about consortia and consort purchasing and just the different ways that consortia can work in library school. What would you say to a new librarian who maybe was wondering if they should belong to a consortium and why?
Rob:
Without a doubt, they should connect to their local consortia. They will immediately be connected with their colleagues, their counterparts they'll be brought into projects. They'll pulled into different committees and discussions. So networking from day one. And that's really important in our space as the live events kind of shift, the online of everything is taken its toll, the community, and that connection to what's local is really important. Tapping into professional development, understanding what's out there regarding services that libraries might be offering outside of where you are working or where you have work. So I think it enables librarians to both what they're doing today. What other libraries are doing tomorrow. It is a community that thrives upon involvement, understanding, participating. I would suggest librarians not only join their consortia, but participate in it, take a role, take a seat, get on the governance and make your mark and, and use your experience to influence your consortia. They need leadership. And that's, what's really important to, to take that stake. They are community builders. They give out grant money, they're they are professionally what libraries need to connect to, and very hard to duplicate that elsewhere, larger organizations speak more about the profession and about the industry. But if you want to connect to leaders that understand their community, their DNA, and kind of their founding value, that's why you need to join a consortium. It's something very different and unique.
Heather:
And I just want to put out there too, that many libraries might be served by several consortia. I'm try. I'm thinking specifically in California, there's Califa, which is statewide, but then there's regional consortia SCLC and PLP that are these kind of mega systems for Northern and Southern California. And then even within that, there's like the Los Angeles area ones or there's, you know, the PLS, the Peninsula Library System, and even then Marinet, which is part of north net, but they're Marin county. And so there's, you know, you can dig down and join just a small group. If you just want to have that local, or you can get on a statewide level, one will be doing different kinds of things and will be serving in a different sort of way.
Rob:
There are there's NELCO, which is a law consortium, there's an art consortium. They've all identified the value and importance of coming together. And it isn't necess necessarily local. It could be other areas that libraries are connecting and it follows the population. Yeah, we were successful cuz we started off in a very populated part of the country and that's how we grew. And that's how we expanded consortium. Now I think our challenge in that capacity of can they grow? How do they grow row, the limitations regarding contracts and who they can add. Let's put a little pressure on the space on how they can serve. And I think it's industry, you know, it's embedded by the industry and there's reasons why, but consortium, I think have done a very good job of recognizing that we don't necessarily have to grow, but what's critical to us is supporting the community that we have in front of us.
Heather:
Now you've brought me talking about publishers and, and the way people work in contracts and things like that. You've brought me to my next question, which is a big part of what people think about consortia is group purchases. Oh, I buy that through my consortium consortium, negotiate contracts with vendors, right. And try and get the best possible deal for everybody. Kind of like Costco, you join cost, go and you get a good deal. Right. But that leads to sometimes certain challenges because often you find yourself on one hand wanting to advocate for a vendor and then also advocating for the library to the vendor. So you find yourself treading this line between what you know is best for the library and also wanting to support the vendor. How do you balance those things?
Rob:
I think it's driven by market change. It's driven by product categories. I always felt the mission of the groups we supported was making sure the market had options and competition and options was critical for libraries, the terms exclusivity, or this is where we can only find it resonated with us early on. As we have to break that up, we have to make sure libraries can see a healthy, vibrant community of products and services. So we decided to go, the route of more is better creating options. And I think that took away the pressures we felt of seeing, you know, 80% of our business going into two or three vendors and then seeing those vendors buy each other out and, and, and market consolidate. And I think it's still an ongoing challenge today is the concept of volume discounts. And whether they're deliverable, whether it's a, whether you can accomplish a value, a volume discount seems to be a challenge.
Rob:
Libraries have spent their money. Libraries, budgets are committed. We don't have the ability as buying clubs, resellers, or groups to come in there and move blocks of business to new vendors. Early on the category was great. Libraries were flushed with funding. They followed a very aggressive collection development strategy, tons of engagement and excitement about product. And that hasn't really happened in a long time in our space. So I think it depends upon where, and at what point in time you got in the industry, as well as the, the impression that the industry had on you and recently, Heather, what we've really understood is the exclusivity that we fought to not have was really the exclusivity exclusive position that the inside sales people have in this company. They got the exclusive, we are just resellers that have to find value in front of our, our clients. So the models changed, but early on, it was great. We would onboard some months, three or four new vendors. So it's, it was an exciting time. The market definitely today is very different.
Heather:
That was how we met because I was a library vendor that you onboarded, I think successfully. I don't remember. It was so long ago. <Laugh> very successful. Okay. Then the other thing about it, and this is something else that, you know, I found working for a consortium is that, you know, we would negotiate these contracts on behalf of our members, trying to get the best possible deal for our libraries. You probably did similar things. It was again, as somebody who's negotiating with lots of different vendors, we would know pricing and we would know terms from potential competitors to these vendors. And of course there's ethics involved with that and there's legal things. There's NDAs and stuff. A and I guess I just wonder, again, that I feel like the job of a consortium so much is like juggling and treading these balancing these different balls that are in the air, understanding politics of this and, and trying to help this vendor because they're new and you like what they're about, but you also know that their pricing is way too high and they're not going to get anybody because this other competitor over here is priced half.
And you don't want to say that because yeah. So I guess I just wonder, how would you balance?
Rob:
We would engage early on until every vendor publisher provider service agent we worked with that pricing is not a science, it's an art and you gotta get messy with it. You have to figure out where the value is against where your cost is in products, in information, it's become a commodity now, and that's driving the market differently. We wouldn't object to of pricing. We would suggest vendors to reconsider pricing, breaking down it, looking at the lens of, well, what is this per FTE or what is this against other spend? We would try to give companies a quick education or insight on, well, that's not how our members are spending money where that's not a collection development focus, but I think it rolled back into the mindset of these companies where they library oriented. Were they coming into this space because they had great software in the commercial side and wanted to test their solution.
Rob:
In libraries, we found that getting to know the vendors, talking to their business development, people explaining to them a little more allowed for were those pricing schedules to start changing and coming down. And nobody knew how to price this stuff. Let's be honest right early on, if you wanted, you know, certain publishers had a 10 to 15 X multiplier to go from print to digital and we had to speak them down off of that price point because libraries just didn't have money. It's a lot of error and then it's a lot of trial and then they find the right price point. The challenge overall is today. Libraries really don't find that what they're spending has any commonality we're trying to, but libraries for many reasons, if we looked at their collection, they paying similar price is not identical to have a uniform price point. Today is a business of impossibility
Heather:
So you talked about working with some of these newer vendor or, you know, when you were working with a new vendor suggesting pricing and things like that, do you have a story of a, a vendor that you feel particularly proud how you influence them?
Rob:
We really enjoyed early on as new categories opened up mm-hmm <affirmative> patterns really show themselves very clearly. If the, if these were publishers converting print, ILS vendors had a very specific pattern regarding their development and their market and other go to market strategy. We didn't really have the ability to influence them or suggest to them to do things differently. We really enjoyed the new categories. Like when eBooks came out, that was wonderful. It was really exciting to see the different models, which models it worked going back years and years bury was first to the market. It made a lot of sense. It completely disrupted this space. And we started working with a lot of these companies that how a solution had a market fit and grew their business really well. The premium services were fantastic. Audio to begin with video next.
Rob:
Then there was a little bit of a squabble on who owns the IP and who was the content creator. And in this consolidation and that consolidation, we really liked working with Serials Solutions. They presented themselves as a company for libraries, and it was the first time that I really saw the power of happy customers, loyal customers, Serials Solutions users would stand up and defend the products, explain the products. They were loyal to the product development cycle. They were willing to take a risk on the technology that they were developing. And this was a small company founded from a few librarians based outta Seattle and to watch them grow, to see them become national international for us, we were excited. We did the quick analysis of our books that I think we were represented about 20% of their market share at a certain point of time. And that would be one of the key takeaways from kind of our first run, running consortia, the experience and the value that you build for both libraries and companies when you're in that small space and you're generating anywhere from 15 to 25% of their market share. It's wonderful. It's, it's a connection. You're speaking to executives, product managers, trainers, sales people, you're in the whole business cycle, which is really wonderful. And for me that's the most exciting space to play is incubating these, these small companies.
Heather:
I have one similar to that, which was mango languages, a language learning vendor. And I, I think Califa was one of their very first consortia calls. And I spent a lot of time working with them on this is how you price it. And you guys should go to this conference and you know, this is, this is the kind of deal we can do. And this is what you're gonna find. And this is what you're up against. And you know, now they're, they're a huge company and they're in colleges and they're international and all of that. And they sell to in individuals, I think too. And I remember when their CEO was at the first CLA conference, then talking to them and explaining how libraries bought things. And and that's been, that was really rewarding to see how they took off after that too. So definitely when you have a good product, that's a good fit with what libraries want and just everybody wins then. And it's it's really cool to see.
Rob:
We felt early on that services that helped libraries save time, became simpler to sell the sales pitch was shorter. The buying cycle and the approval cycle was shorter. Cause it really saved them time. And that cat really exploded right around 2010, 2011, when all these services were rushed into our industry and those were exciting and, and saving people time and saving people, money also became very transparent. It's gonna be hard to duplicate that experience today. Connecting with the small companies is, is our mission. We want to do that. Find their customers and grow their brands.
Heather:
Yeah. Very cool. You know what? We've been going for half an hour on this. I know it seems like it was just a minute. So I know there's a, there's a lot of other topics that we had talked about that you had written down on chatting about, but I think maybe we have to leave that for another episode. Cause we've talked.
Rob:
I got, I got, I do have one story that I, I have to get the episode one, go for it. No. Early on we tried to connect to conferences, live traveling, driving around the Northeast, whether they were regional events, state events. And it was a little hectic because sometimes you would miss the signup period. We couldn't necessarily pinpoint ourselves on the floor plan. And one year at, at Nyla, we were late to register and we got like one of one or two spots left and it was geographically undesirable. You might say, and it was cornered and we accepted it. We went there and boy did we have a learning experience? We were next to somebody that had nothing to do with libraries. It was a vendor that was there selling chachis. Okay. They were anything from what you had give your kids or grandkids when they were young, they were stuffed animals. They were closed. They, oh my gosh. It was just a, it was a booth of Chachi. And the amount of people coming into that booth was so significant kid that we were just pulling in the people that were three and four deep into our -
Heather:
I remember those booth, the t-shirts and the souvenirs and stuff. And I just, I remember always going past and they're always packed and I always think to myself, oh gosh, like that would be a cool side hustle to like buy some, buy some tchotchki's and get a booth. And I'm mean I'm are every industry, their trade show has something like that.
Rob:
Definitely. It was a one of these experiences that you can't get trained on that you only see when you're there, the accidental opportunity you ran into. Yeah. Then to walk out and see a separate business of people outside paying to put this stuff in boxes and ship it. And right. It was like a little micro economy right in front of this. Yeah. They had a great event. I mean, they that's awesome. They, they did really well, lots of stories like that. I would love to talk about this again and consortium need to be supported at a variety of different ways in life levels and lot, lots more to come about this in the future. For sure.
Heather:
Definitely. and can I just get one final thought on what you're taking into the next chapter of, of your life here and the next, the next phase on the, what you've learned so far?
Rob:
Absolutely. We are currently putting together the, a blueprint regarding what's next in this space for helping libraries acquire and license content, looking at the market conditions, understanding the value that everybody needs, understanding engagement. We're kind of putting all of these requirements in front of us and I we'll have a solution in the market shortly mission driven, supporting making sure libraries get back into their community. Influencing. We have a lot of great ideas more to come on that. And thank thank you for asking.
Heather:
A great, that was a little tease. That's great. So we'll see more of that in the future. Thanks Rob, for chatting with me as always and subscribe to the show. If you don't already on all of your various podcast catchers, common stacks.com, join our slack channels. Start to share some of your own discussions about how you got into libraries. We'd love to hear from you, what vendors work, what vendors didn't work, what have been some great experiences you've had with your own consortia. Do you belong to a consortia? Do you even know some librarians don't even know if they belong to a consort, they belong to several consortia and they do not even know that they belong. You know, if you don't know, if you belong to a consortia, ask your library director or somebody and, and I'm sure you, you do so. Thanks for listening.