Cooperation 2013 - Inventing the Future

The point of departure of this year’s CASLIN seminar is the assumption that the future of individual libraries and of their services is increasingly a function of their cooperation. The question is what such cooperation can look like, what is its structure, what drives it, motivates it and guarantees it. The answers are many while none of them are straightforward and both the questions and their possible answers take on a different look depending on how the problem of cooperation among libraries is articulated. The fact of the matter is that it is not only dependent on the internal and different dynamics of the participating libraries and their traditional mandates or on the willingness of individuals but also, if not primarily, on the external, legislative, economic and political conditions the present state of which we don’t usually grasp fully though we seem to know how to argue about their future when we know nothing about it. What can we do?

The goal of the seminar is to facilitate an organized debate that will, during two days of strategic planning, lead to the defining of key problems, the identification of the parameters that delimit possible solutions and, in the end, to resulting constructions of four concrete models of cooperation among libraries. In addition, the seminar itself suggests a model and method of a constructive planning process.