Draft Vision, Mission, and Values, for Community Review

The ReShare Steering Committee has drafted vison, mission, and values statements for Community review. We invite feedback on these provisional statements through Friday, October 20, 2023, via this form.

Below are the drafts for review by the ReShare Community.

VISION

To serve as libraries’ competitive advantage in developing the most compelling innovation and agency in support of collections and resource sharing, while maintaining an inclusive and sustainable ecosystem that is fully accountable to its community of co-investors.

MISSION

To set the standard for how libraries collaborate, partner, share resources and connect patrons to the information they require by developing user-centered, standards-based, community-driven, and community-owned library resource sharing technologies and tools.

VALUES

Details of each of the five values listed below, including its definition and how it will be upheld and promoted, are available at this values overview document.

  1. Trust
  2. Community Ownership
  3. Openness and Transparency
  4. Sustainability
  5. Impact through Innovation

Community Meeting on Thursday, September 14, 2023

ReShare Community members are invited to the Community Meeting on Thursday, September 14, 2023, 12:00-1:30 EST. The Steering Committee will be sharing important information about the project, including membership updates, planned implementations, finances, and proposed refinements of our foundational vision. Register for the meeting via this Zoom registration link.   

ReShare update: scoping, membership, finances, and commitment to the vision 

ReShare has grown substantially since it was first established in 2018, expanding from its initial 13 member organizations with a shared mission to create an open source, community-owned resource sharing platform, to having more than thirty member organizations by early 2023, offering a fully operational system. Four leading consortia – PALCI, ConnectNY, Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation, and TRLN – are actively using the ReShare platform, with CAVAL and Minitex in the process of implementing. The bulk of the initial software development work was provided by Knowledge Integration and Index Data, as well as Lehigh University Libraries. Development of ReShare’s controlled digital lending (CDL) functionality is also well-underway, in partnership with the Boston Library Consortium.

In Spring 2023, the ReShare Steering Committee recognized the need for a strategic planning retreat, given the meteoric growth of the community and increasing interest in developing a wide range of tools to address multiple resource sharing use cases. Questions around ReShare’s roadmap, sustainability, and development decisions were also growing as the potential scope of the project expanded. 

The two-day intensive planning retreat was designed with the help of consultant and facilitator Dr. Deb Mashek. The retreat’s goals were to characterize the complexity of ReShare’s work, articulate learnings to date, and plan for the future in order to sustain the continuous and on-going development of the community. 

Perhaps the most complex issues the Steering Committee grappled with during the retreat were 1) the recognition that two possibly competing platforms had emerged within the community with implications and risk to ReShare’s overall sustainability, and 2) a lack of consensus with respect to the meaning and implementation of “community ownership” in the context of ReShare product development. Central to this conversation were issues of sustainability and a focus on the ReShare Code of Conduct’s requirement that participants “not replace community infrastructure; instead, improve it.” 

Pursuant to those retreat discussions, the Steering Committee reasserted that the ReShare software development roadmap, including the prioritization and application of any centralized, community funds or resources, must be owned and directed by ReShare’s membership. 

On the final day of the retreat, the Steering Committee voted:

  1. to support a pause in major roadmap decisions to enable the Steering Committee to reflect and fully articulate ReShare’s community ownership process in a way that engaged ReShare members;
  2. to support an initial, if temporary, moratorium on the use of the ReShare brand name in describing the development effort that had previously been referred to as “DCB” or “direct consortial borrowing” (an effort which was initially defined in the MOBIUS RFP and funded by EBSCO) until its technical implications were more fully understood by ReShare members, and until it had been submitted and vetted through an accepted ReShare community process.* (See Notes)

At the retreat’s conclusion, members of the Steering Committee expressed a desire that ReShare’s community ownership processes be inclusive and applicable to all members, and that the features and functionality represented in DCB development efforts be integrated into ReShare’s platform and community ownership processes in the future.  

Following the retreat, a number of ReShare members – namely EBSCO, Knowledge Integration, MOBIUS, MCLS, and Marmot – opted to depart from the ReShare community to support DCB development efforts external to ReShare with a distinct and separate set of business needs and expectations for community governance and process.  

The ReShare Steering Committee’s decisions about the application of its brand name reflected careful consideration of project sustainability and scoping, keeping in mind the initiative’s core values of trust, transparency, and community ownership. While the retreat outcomes caused disruption that the Steering Committee is now addressing, the past few weeks have sharpened the Committee’s focus on service to library and consortia-articulated use cases, needs, and community expectations.  Steering Committee members are working diligently on preserving the integrity of ReShare’s shared community development vision, and providing opportunities for effective future collaboration with external partners, including the newly separated DCB initiative.

Also following the retreat, and with the impending departure from the community of the organization that serves as the project’s fiscal agent, the Steering Committee began expediting the transition of the project’s financial management with a focus on transparency. The next Community Meeting will include a detailed financial report.

The ReShare Steering Committee will meet again on August 25, 2023 at the University of Chicago. The priorities for this meeting are to:

  • further define and articulate community ownership expectations and processes
  • revise governance structures and membership to support current and anticipated needs
  • create a plan for financial and organizational sustainability, including identifying a new fiscal agent to support an optimized and transparent financial model. 

The Steering Committee has been energized by the opportunity to revisit and recommit to our initial vision. We have scheduled a community meeting for Thursday, September 14, 12:00-1:30 pm EST, via Zoom. Community members will be receiving a separate calendar invite for this meeting. In preparation for that meeting, we invite all members to share ideas and questions via this form. The community meeting will be an opportunity to discuss form submissions and to provide updates on product roadmapping. The meeting will be open to all ReShare community members.

Sent on behalf of voting members of the ReShare Steering Committee:

Charlie Barlow, Ginny Boyer, Kristin Calvert, Lisa Croucher, Sebastian Hammer, David Larsen, Boaz Nadav Manes, Julia Proctor, Zheng Ye (Lan) Yang

NOTES:

  1. In August 2022, MOBIUS announced that it would implement ReShare Returnables alongside its migration to FOLIO. At the time, Knowledge Integration had indicated it would develop features in ReShare Returnables to support direct consortial borrowing (DCB) for MOBIUS, a core feature in their legacy INN-Reach system. Other ReShare member consortia also indicated interest in development of this functionality on the ReShare platform.

DCB fundamentally differs from other forms of ILL, lending directly to a patron at another institution, rather than to a borrowing/requesting library. To support DCB, ReShare’s underlying platform required significant modifications, and ultimately, Knowledge Integration, with funding from EBSCO, decided to pursue DCB functionality as a wholly separate software stack, with the intention to brand the product as “ReShare DCB.” 

Because EBSCO and Knowledge Integration built DCB functionality via a competitive RFP process without direct input from ReShare’s Steering Committee or the wider community, DCB was not incorporated into the ReShare roadmap or evaluated under established processes to assess new functional requirements. The DCB platform, as it was developed for MOBIUS, is independent from ReShare’s existing code base.

UPDATE, 9/21/23: The original version of this news item has been updated to remove 1) a statement regarding fiscal agency and 2) the statement that the name of the DCB platform had not yet been determined as of original publication date.

UPDATE, 8/25/23: The original version of this news item has been updated to remove the statement that the DCB platform is “expected to be tied to EBSCO’s proprietary discovery platform, Locate.”

Kurt Munson Reflects on Project ReShare

Kurt Munson, Head of Access Services at Northwestern University, has been involved with Project ReShare since its inception.  He has served several important roles in the Project, including as a member of the Steering Committee and as Chair of the Product Management Team since 2018.  He was instrumental in the visioning of what Project ReShare could become, and he announced last month that he is stepping down from his official roles in Project ReShare. We want to celebrate his contributions and learn from his experience by interviewing him for the Project ReShare news site. 

Project ReShare: You’ve been involved with Project ReShare since the beginning.  Can you talk a little about how it all began?

Kurt Munson: Sebastian (Hammer,Co-Founder and President of Index Data) and I had a chat at the Midwinter meeting of the American Library Association in Denver [in 2018]. We were concerned about contraction and consolidation in the ILL software marketplace leaving libraries with fewer and fewer choices as well as a concern that standards for interoperability were being ignored. We got a group together for a first meeting in August of that year and started fleshing out what a product could be and, more importantly, how to have a community of support around it.

Project ReShare: What has changed since those early days?

Kurt Munson: ReShare has forced “churn in the market,” as I call it. ISO 18626 is now on all roadmaps due, I think, to our early adoption of that standard for ReShare. We have a growing community of users and a strong base of people committed to the project who graciously give their time to share knowledge to develop better products. 

Project ReShare: What are you most excited about for the future of ReShare?

Kurt Munson: Expansion both in functionalities and user base. The ability to build out a group of software functions to meet the needs of many different types of libraries as well as different groupings of libraries. More than anything else it’s the creativity of the community as it pushes the boundaries. ReShare has grown so much and my decision to step down is because the project is well past my ability to effectively support it with my knowledge and experience. In the words of Banksy- “When the time comes to leave, just walk away quietly and don’t make any fuss.”

In the end, I don’t know if Project ReShare benefited more from this experience or honestly that I did. It was a wonderful collaborative learning experience from which I have learned a great deal that I use daily.

Open Project ReShare Meeting on March 20

We are pleased to open up our regular quarterly ReShare community meeting to anyone interested in Project ReShare on March 20th at 12pm ET. 

During this call, we’ll describe the development progress made by the community to-date, share news of current implementations, and give insight into future development directions.

We invite you to join us, learn about ReShare, and discuss!

When: Mar 20, 2023 12:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0pduGqpzsqGNa-7XE-IPDF5pcGSXNC072Y

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Introducing Reservoir, the module behind ReShare’s Shared Inventory

Clara Fehrenbach spoke with Sebastian Hammer, Co-founder and President of Index Data, to learn more about Reservoir.

ReShare Shared Inventory

A shared inventory and consortial discovery has been a foundational piece of the Project ReShare vision since the beginning.  The 2021 ReShare Returnables launches at PALCI and ConnectNY went live with FOLIO’s Inventory module (dubbed “mod-inventory” in FOLIO-speak) as the basis for ReShare’s Shared Inventory storage, which in turn feeds into discovery layers, such as VuFind. Mod-inventory worked for its purpose, but it became clear that the way ReShare needs to ingest and use bibliographic data calls for a more flexible shared inventory infrastructure that is designed to ingest data from many different sources (i.e. individual member libraries in a consortium.)

Because ReShare was intended to be modular from the start, it was possible for Project ReShare and Index Data to be responsive to the needs of the community and update the infrastructure behind the Shared Inventory.

What is Reservoir?

Originally coined mod-meta-storage, Reservoir is the new underlying infrastructure of ReShare Shared Inventory.  Based primarily on PostgreSQL, Reservoir was envisioned and realized due to community need, both to address inefficiencies discovered in the live environments at PALCI and ConnectNY and to support the onboarding of IPLC onto ReShare Returnables using their Platform for Open Data (POD) infrastructure. Reservoir is designed to be both fast (quickly handling a very large number of records) and flexible (poised to reuse its contents for future purposes.)

In order to accomplish speed and flexibility, Reservoir does not merge records as they’re imported in the same way that mod-inventory was designed to do.  According to Sebastian, Reservoir works instead by “storing incoming bibliographic records separately and ‘clustering’ them using a match algorithm.” Then the records can be “merged” later for use in a consortial discovery layer or for other purposes. This method of clustering now, merging later was designed to allow much easier experimentation with different matching algorithms, since clusters can be reconfigured or rebuilt without needing a full data reload. It’s even possible to use more than one different matching algorithm at the same time with Reservoir.

Want to know how much faster Reservoir is?  Consider this: Using Reservoir, it takes less than a week to ingest, merge, and process a collection of about 80 million bibliographic records. Before Reservoir, it would have taken approximately five months to complete the same process.

Why “reservoir”?

A reservoir is “a large natural or artificial lake used as a source of water supply.”

Taking inspiration from “data lake” terminology and imagery, Reservoir was named because it is envisioned as a data lake that ingests data from sources “upstream” and provides a supply of “clean” data to any service positioned “downstream.”  Currently, the primary use of this data is in consortial discovery using VuFind, but it could be adapted for many different purposes, including consortial collection analysis.

Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation (IPLC) to Implement ReShare Returnables

The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation (IPLC) recently announced their intention to implement ReShare Returnables in Summer 2022. IPLC also intends to become a member of the ReShare Community.

IPLC writes “The new software will create more efficient staff workflows, eliminating some of the time and complicated steps needed to deliver items to patrons.”

Project ReShare Welcomes Boston Library Consortium

December 22, 2021

Project ReShare closes out the year by welcoming the Boston Library Consortium (BLC) to the ReShare Community. In addition to contributing leadership and engagement to the Project, BLC will be making a significant financial contribution. Founded in 1970, the BLC is an academic library consortium serving 21 public and private universities, liberal arts colleges, state and special research libraries in the northeastern United States.

The BLC’s collective collection has been a cornerstone throughout its history, and the consortium has always sought creative ways to leverage the collection for the benefit of member institutions. With the transformative opportunity of controlled digital lending (CDL), BLC is once again seeking an opportunity to make resource sharing more valuable and effective for its members. 

BLC’s recent efforts to develop a path forward for consortial controlled digital lending (CDL) have illuminated the significant need for alternative resource sharing technologies to those currently available from vendors, in particular the need for community-led and community-governed alternatives such as Project ReShare. “The current library technology market has left libraries to cobble together solutions that meet local needs that fail to truly capitalize on the transformative potential that CDL offers,” said Charlie Barlow, BLC’s executive director. “The possibilities for an interoperable solution developed collaboratively by and for libraries and consortia hold great promise.”

The initial $100,000 financial commitment from the BLC is intended to accelerate the development path for CDL functionality within the ReShare client. 

For Dorothy Meaney, president of the BLC and director of the Tisch Library at Tufts University, joining Project ReShare offers the BLC the opportunity to magnify its impact by collaborating with other libraries to collectively shape the future of both CDL and resource sharing more broadly. “Our goals for resource sharing align with those of other libraries and consortia,” said Meaney. “Through Project ReShare we see the chance to contribute our expertise and leadership in this space, for the long-term benefit of libraries.” 

The BLC’s CDL Steering Committee, which is guiding the consortium’s implementation of CDL, is prepared to work directly with Project ReShare community members and developers on the development of CDL functionality. As a result of the work that the BLC has done thus far, coupled with its previous discussions with other Project ReShare members and staff from Index Data, the consortium has a great deal of expertise and vision for CDL, and how this can manifest in practical, impactful solutions for libraries and consortia.

Tim McGeary, chair of the Project ReShare Steering Committee, praised BLC’s investment in Project ReShare. “We recognize that such a large financial commitment isn’t possible for everyone, but we hope BLC’s investment will serve as a model for other potential members,” McGeary noted. “Interest in Project ReShare is increasing rapidly, and the financial investments are crucial to our being able to meet the development expectations of the community.”

The decision to join Project ReShare was approved unanimously by the BLC Board of Directors. 

About Project ReShare

The ReShare Community is a group of libraries, consortia, information organizations and developers, with both commercial and non-commercial interests, who came together in 2018 to create Project ReShare – a new and open approach to library resource sharing. The ReShare Community has a bold vision for building a user-centered, app-based, community-owned resource sharing platform for libraries to set a new standard for how we connect library patrons to the resources and information they require. 

For more information, contact info@projectreshare.org.

To receive email updates from Project ReShare, please sign up for the Project ReShare news list at https://projectreshare.org/contact.

​​About the Boston Library Consortium

Founded in 1970, the Boston Library Consortium (BLC) is an academic library consortium serving public and private universities, liberal arts colleges, state and special research libraries in the northeastern United States. The BLC members collaborate to deliver innovative and cost-effective sharing of print and digital content, professional development initiatives, and projects across a wide range of library practice areas. For more information, visit blc.org.

Questions about ReShare? Our documentation wiki is here to help!

While many library staffers are already using ReShare everyday, they may not know that the project has been working to create a comprehensive documentation hub.

The ReShare documentation wiki features detailed descriptions of core software features, such as request states, processing actions, and external integrations. It also includes workflow guides designed by librarians that bring together groups of functions commonly used together.

You can find a link to the documentation wiki at https://projectreshare.org or access it directly at https://openlibraryenvironment.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/PR.

In the coming months, ReShare will continue to expand this documentation with the help of the project community. If you are interested in helping to support the documentation effort, please contact us at info@projectreshare.org.

November 2021 Community Meeting Recap

On November 15, Project ReShare held a Community Meeting that gave members the opportunity to focus on community-building and sustainability. Attendees had the opportunity to connect with each other in small breakout rooms to discuss the state of the Project and to brainstorm how to help ensure the sustainability of the Project for the future. Members were encouraged to reflect on opportunities and challenges and think about how to increase participation and welcome new members to the community.

In the breakout rooms, members shared that they particularly value the community-focus of Project ReShare and appreciate how ReShare Returnables is able to interoperate with a wide variety of other systems. There was an appreciation for the diversity in library types and sizes involved, and it was noted that there are lots of opportunities for future development as well as enhancements to existing functionality.

The participants also discussed how to ensure the financial and community sustainability of Project ReShare. Attendees provided input on financial and development contributions of members and how to onboard new members with a focus on integrating new and existing voices into the organizational structure of Project ReShare.