Technical services consolidation a possibility in Massachusetts college libraries

Leonard Kniffel reports in American Libraries on efforts that are underway to consolidate the technical services operations of five Massachusetts college libraries: Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Since the Sept. 29 release of a Technical Services Consolidation Task Force report, a decision has been made to study the issues further, based on reactions to the report. Jay Schafer, director of libraries at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, maintains that “consolidating these services is a difficult task and impacts many layers in our libraries and our organizations, but we’ve been talking about this for a couple of years. It’s not easy, but it’s something that we have to explore.”