Columbia and Cornell University Libraries are pleased to join forces in a transformative and enduring partnership between our two great library systems that enables us to pool resources to provide content, expertise, and services that are impossible to accomplish acting alone. We imagine that this partnership, called 2CUL, will result in a broad integration on a number of fronts, in such areas as cataloging, e-resource management, collaborative collection development, and digital preservation. Through combined efforts we will be able to fill gaps in the scholarly record that exist because our separate institutional resources are insufficient to meet inflationary publisher costs and an expanding scholarly output. With the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and in partnership with Ithaka S+R Research, we are spending the next two years investigating the prerequisites for radical collaboration, including legal, technical, fiduciary, and governance issues that underpin this relationship. Early focus is placed on the enabling infrastructure, such as a shared back-end cataloging/acquisitions system, a shared long-term digital archive, fast and reliable book and digital document delivery, a better sense of collection strengths and gaps, and a more refined understanding of user expectations. This website provides background information on the 2CUL initiative as well as contact information if you are interested in learning more about the collaborative models being tested.
We welcome your thoughts and suggestions for making 2CUL a success.
