There is an old African saying: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” The Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida (UF) are active participants in a number of collaborative collection development initiatives that provide significant benefits to us, to our partners, and to others who benefit from the results of our efforts. Each of these initiatives requires a significant effort to establish and sustain trust and to maintain the value to the collaborators. Each step often takes longer to plan and to execute because a number of people have to be consulted and have their preferences and concerns addressed. But UF continues to invest in these initiatives and to seek additional opportunities for deep collaboration, because in the end, they take us much farther than we can go alone.
Examples of these collaborations, and the details that challenged us, include the ASERL Collaborative Federal Depository Program; the Digital Library of the Carribean (dLOC); the Florida Academic Repository (FLARE) and Scholar’s Trust, two shared print archiving projects in which Florida has a lead or significant role; a somewhat controversial collaboration with Elsevier, recently expended to include other publishers through CHORUS; and a new partnership with the Biblioteca Nacional “José Martí” de Cuba, (BNJM) to establish a Cuban Heritage collection for worldwide public access by collaborating with other research libraries to digitize monographs, journals, newspapers, and government documents from and about Cuba produced primarily before the 20th Century.
