We’re excited to be kicking off the official CAVAL blog – even if the notion of an organisational blog is somewhat quaintly outdated in these heady days of TikTok-ing and Instagram. We hope you’ll enjoy it anyway 😉
CAVAL is a bit of an interesting beast – not a vendor, not a library, nor a professional association, and our role in the library community is frequently misunderstood. So, to help clear up the confusion, we thought we’d start a blog! Not just to talk about what CAVAL is, obviously (although that is a great place to start) – but to start talking about the things that matter to us – as an organisation, and as library industry professionals.
In fact, CAVAL is a not-for-profit consortium, established by 11 universities in Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania 45 years ago with the fairly broad mandate of supporting cooperative activities and projects for the mutual benefit of its members and the wider library community. As a not-for-profit organisation, our goal is to make sustainable choices and offer affordable support in areas that individual libraries might struggle to resource independently.
Over the years that means we have gotten to contribute to and lead some pretty interesting projects, primarily in the areas of library tech, metadata, resource sharing, and professional development. For example, we do a lot to make sure people from non-English speaking backgrounds in Australia and New Zealand have access to library materials in their own language – we select, purchase, and catalogue resources in over 60 different languages. In-house selection and description of these materials for many libraries would be an impossibility due to the resource-intensive nature of the work, and the difficulty associated with finding staff with the appropriate language and professional expertise.
We also store and maintain the CAVAL Archival and Research Collection. Housed in our CARM store, the CAVAL Archival and Research Collection is a continuously expanding, nationally significant collection of last-copy resources contributed by our member libraries, to ensure that a single copy of each title is preserved and retained in Australia for future use.
For around 30 years now the Victorian Reciprocal borrowing program and our InterLibrary Loan services have ensured that students and staff of participating Universities have been able to borrow materials directly (and slightly less directly, via ILL programs) from other institutions.
We do these things because they matter.
It matters that libraries can offer students and community members resources in their mother language and that they are appropriately catalogued and findable.
It matters that students are able to browse and borrow relevant material for their studies even if those resources are held by another library, and that the shared infrastructure and processes necessary to facilitate them doing so are as transparent, efficient and as user-friendly as we can make them.
It matters that we maintain the historical record of the texts that Australian University students based their learning on from 20, 30 and 100 years ago, so we can understand where we have come from.
It’s all part of what libraries, and library professionals are here for. So that’s what we want to talk about in our blog. The things that matter to us all – shelf matters!
Discover more from Shelf Matters
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.