Out of the Box - Libraries in Co-operative Innovation

Tools for Strategical Library Development

Libraries are under pressure and need to develop and manifest themselves. Partnerships and collaborative innovation is a method to secure and develop the libraries’ influence on society.

Many libraries already collaborate with external partners, but very few libraries have a strategical and professional way of working with partnerships. Instead of considering partnerships and external collaboration as a method to continuously achieve the library’s overall objectives, the external collaboration is often used for small and unexpected needs.

The project Out of the Box – Libraries in Collaborative Innovation has collected and adapted knowledge of partnership work and collaborative innovation. Against that background the project has worked on how libraries can professionalise their external collaboration in order to manifest and transform the role of the libraries in city culture.

Build Partnerships

Under the headline Build Partnerships, the project has developed a guide, a tool box, a website with knowledge about and inspiration to partnership work as well as the movie Better Together.

Build Partnerships asks questions to and emphasizes important considerations on the way in which the library draws up partnership strategies, how the library prepares the organisation and what collaboration in partnerships demands from the library and the employees.

However, Build Partnerships! also identifies what libraries and their partners can gain from collaborating and how they can mutually enrich and develop each other’s services, businesses and organisations.

Last but not least Build Partnerships! provides a number of tools that can be used for the practical tasks in and around the partnership. There are tools for evaluation, for communication planning and for drawing up written agreements etc.

About the Project

The development project Out of the Box! ran from 1 March 2010 – 30 June 2012. The project was a partnership between Citizens’ Services and Libraries in Aarhus, Roskilde Libraries and Roskilde University. The project also collaborated with D.A. Royal School of Library and Information Science and Dacapo A/S.

The project was subsidised by the Danish Agency for Culture’s Development Pool for Public and School Libraries.

The project’s products can be found at www.bygpartnerskaber.dk.

About the project (pdf)