Over time, it is possible to imagine American Social History Online as a "stand-alone" product. Not in the sense that it would be monolithic, rather that American Social History Online components will be seen as a places scholars go to do their work rather than as a digital library interoperability experiment. DLF Aquifer, having grown and released American Social History Online could join the next round of interoperability work in the community, building on lessons learned from American Social History Online.
What organizational models would support this kind of flow? I remain quite taken by the model outlined by Raymond E. Miles, Grant Miles and Charles C. Snow in Collaborative Entrepreneurship published in 2005 by Stanford University Press. Miles and colleagues describe a small, nimble entrepreneurial organization that spins off ideas and partially developed products to individual companies that participate in the collaboration.
After reading the book, I contacted Miles by e-mail. He was gracious enough to offer some tips about the kinds of problems companies are collaborating to solve such as working together to convince upstream vendors, which they all use to comply with standards. This is certainly a problem that applies equally to libraries. Miles also noted that, "the collaborative skills we discuss imagine a deeper level of learning than occurs within most teams and intra-firm networks, and we are enjoying the challenge of trying to reach that level." Something to think about in our community.
What organizations in the current research library landscape might serve as entrepreneurial hubs and what organizations might ultimately nurture and support the products and services the innovation incubators generate? In addition to ad hoc collaborations and consortia organized by geography or class of library, examples of organizations that do sponsor or generate new development include OCLC Research, the Digital Library Federation, the Council of Library and Information Resources, NISO and Ithaka. Other initiatives with less organizational structure and a more specific focus might include the Open Archives Initiative and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. Operating collaborative initiatives from a small, nimble organization that is perceived to be neutral does have advantages in getting things done, although obtaining resources for collaboration from participants can be challenging.
There is some overlap between innovation incubators and organizations with infrastructure to nurture and support products and services including OCLC, Ithaka, individual libraries that host services for their own constituencies and consortia that run services for groups. Other initiatives such as DSpace, Fedora and LOCKSS have grown their organizations along with their technologies. Upstream suppliers of software also run systems and services, most of which are developed for a range of customers with less community participation than would be available in a true collaboration.
In the book, Miles et al. make a distinction between collaboration and cooperation,
"...we suggest that collaboration differs from... cooperation in two main ways. First, cooperation is motivated by the benefits each party expects to receive from sharing ideas, information or resources. Therefore, while cooperative behavior may be enjoyable in its own right, it is primarily extrinsically motivated. Second, because cooperative behavior ultimately involves the pursuit of self-interest, it requires periodic or even continual assessment by each participant of the amount of trust and commitment of the other party. In collaborative relationships, on the other hand, each party is as committed to the other's interests as it is to its own, and this commitment reduces the need for the continual assessment of trust and its implications for how rewards will be divided." p.40If DLF Aquifer is a collaborative interoperability innovation generator, it could keep running under the auspices of any organization committed to leveraging digital library resources through collaboration. American Social History Online might spin-off more fully, moving to a host that is set up to run services and support business models that can sustain them, a library or a service provider. The generate and spin-off process would be a small test case for Collaborative Entrepreneurship in the research library sector.
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