Copyright © January 2003. The Urban Institute and Urban Libraries Council. All rights
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The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.
Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).
CONTENTS
Cultural institutions across the country are experimenting with partnerships in efforts to expand offerings to current clients and/or broaden their appeal to reach new constituencies. These partnerships offer important lessons for institutions hoping to engage new constituencies and for policy makers concerned with broadening access to public resources and fostering creative opportunities for free choice learning.
I. Introduction
We explore a variety of partnering behaviors across libraries, museums, and public broadcasters in seven communities, involving 26 different kinds of partnership arrangements.
II. Individuals and Free-Choice Learning Opportunities
The test of institutional and partnership value is whether learning opportunities expand. A conceptual framework supported by national survey data shows how characteristics of individuals and communities link to participation choices--the potential payoffs from partnering.
III. Assets and Liabilities of Partnerships
The four types of institutions discussed here have different governing, financing, and legal arrangements. They also differ in the ways they engage their constituents, their organizational assets, and the imperatives and challenges they face.
IV. Partnerships and Their Activities
Each group of partnering activities carries a unique set of challenges and opportunities for the partnering institutions and the community. Meeting these challenges and exploiting new opportunities depends upon both the routine demands of the activity and the institutional resources available to carry out the work.
V. Partnership Risks and Mitigation Strategies
Engaging in partnerships involves risks, but also returns. Risks increase with the degree of project innovation, complexity, and level of institutional interdependence. But partnerships have learned how to mitigate these risks and reap positive returns.
VI. Partnership Dynamics
Institutional partnerships evolve through a sequence of program stages, from a partnership's gestation to its final termination or transformation. As a partnership changes, different partnering structures evolve.
VII. Conclusions
Partnership initiatives show that public institutions can be linked in ways that not only broaden opportunities for individuals but also provide unique public benefits to communities.
Appendix I: List of Respondents
List of Exhibits
I. INTRODUCTION
Libraries, museums, and public broadcasters face an extraordinary challenge in the coming century. A surge of new populations, languages, and cultures has placed added demands on the content and quality of the services these institutions provide.
But innovative digital technologies offer exciting opportunities to meet this demand, even as they pose threats to traditional ways of doing business. Library, museum, and public broadcasting executives have begun to explore creative ways to seize these opportunities—through partnering with one another to expand and improve the services they provide.
We offer a framework here that helps in understanding how such partnerships can help executives of libraries, museums, and public broadcasters expand learning opportunities for a new urban America. The framework shows how different institutions offer different pathways to opportunity, so that partnerships can help increase the ways these organizations can connect to their audiences. It also shows how partnering can raise the quality of these opportunities, making them more rewarding to those who would seize them.
Partnerships are not necessarily easy, nor do they automatically lead to better programs. The institutions we studied have assets, but they also have liabilities. Partnering organizations need to get a fix on both, and on the ways they affect different types of projects, to minimize and mitigate the risks of failure. The partnerships we reviewed have found ways to do just that, even for innovative and complex projects. These examples of smart responses to problems offer guidance to others thinking about, or already involved in, partnerships with other institutions.
Cultural and educational institutions across the country are experimenting with partnerships in an effort to expand the range, quality, and accessibility of learning opportunities for America's citizens. Museums, libraries, and public broadcasters are worthy members of this group. They all do cultural programming, and all have either deep connections to educational institutions or educational departments within their own organizations. At stake for all of them is their ability to attract the sustained engagement of citizens, which is essential to the survival of the institutions themselves.
Political, civic, and business leaders agree on the importance of continuing education to the life of the nation. Some have argued for a grand alliance of libraries, public television, museums, public radio, and elementary, secondary, and higher educational institutions across the country to further the nation's commitment to learning in all of its forms. This alliance, they say, would organize support for policies, programs, and research to further the vision of a continuously learning citizenry, workforce, culture, and community.
But such an alliance will have little traction among political and business supporters unless its members can demonstrate their ability to produce concrete improvements in the number, quality, and accessibility of learning opportunities for all citizens. This monograph shows how local partnerships among libraries, museums, public radio, and public television are doing just this.
EXHIBIT 1
Types of Partners Involved in Projects by Study Sites |
| |
| SITE |
PUBLIC
LIBRARY |
CHILDREN'S
MUSEUM |
OTHER MUSEUM
(HISTORY/SCIENCE/ART) |
PUBLIC TV/RADIO |
|
| Chicago |
 |
|
|
|
|
| Denver |
|
|
|
|
|
| Cleveland |
|
|
|
|
|
| Houston |
|
|
|
|
|
| Indianapolis |
|
|
|
|
|
| Madison |
|
|
|
|
|
| Rochester |
|
|
|
|
|
RESEARCH SOURCES AND METHODS
This monograph relies for the most part on field investigations carried out in 2001 and 2002 in seven communities—Houston, Denver, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Chicago, Madison, and Rochester. We selected these cities based on the variety of partnerships carried out by the four types of institutions that are our focus. In each city, we spoke with the directors of institutions involved in partnerships and staff responsible for day-to-day conduct of partnership activities. We also spoke with staff of institutions involved as secondary actors in these partnerships—those who played supporting roles but had no primary responsibility for the design or implementation of partnership initiatives. (Appendix I gives a complete list of persons we interviewed.)
The diverse institutions in our seven communities provide a rich set of comparisons. The public libraries range from mid-sized urban library systems, such as Madison Public Library and the Rochester Public Library, to large urban systems, such as the Chicago Public Library and the Houston Public Library. The museums vary considerably by size and content area. Children's museums are most common, with five of the seven cities having a local children's museum as principal partner. We found partnerships involving historical societies and museums in Denver, Madison, and Rochester; and art museums in Chicago, Denver, Cleveland, and Houston. Public radio and television stations were less common as partners, but we found them involved in partnerships in Chicago, Houston, Madison, and Cleveland. The report also relies on research carried out by Dr. George D'Elia, Director of the Center for Applied Research in Library and Information Science at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. Supported by the same IMLS grant as the Urban Institute investigators, Dr. D'Elia was responsible for two surveys.
He engaged Goldhaber Research Associates to conduct a Random Digit Dialing Telephone survey in 100 of the largest US metropolitan areas. The 1,205 respondents were asked about their patronage of the institutions included in this survey, their interests and preferred modes of learning about their interests, and certain of their economic and demographic characteristics.
Dr. D'Elia and his staff also conducted a survey of library and museum directors and the chief executive officers (CEOs) of public radio and television stations in the top 100 U.S. metropolitan areas. Survey respondents were asked to report on their partnering activities, their reasons for partnering with any of the other three types of organizations, and their perceptions of their own and others' strengths as institutions. A supplement to the main survey asked the project managers of these partnerships to report on their activities.
STRUCTURE OF THE REPORT
Section II provides a conceptual framework for assessing the opportunities and challenges presented by any partnering initiative. This framework builds on the premise that individual and community characteristics govern the participation choices institutions depend on for audience expansion and seek through partnering. Section III discusses the institutional assets and liabilities that must be taken into account when making partnering decisions. Section IV follows up this discussion with a review of different partnership structures and types of activity. Section V makes the point that partnership involves risks as well as returns and illustrates how partnerships can work to mitigate those risks. Section VI discusses how partnership structures inevitably change over time, as specific projects change or end. The report concludes with a brief discussion of how the types of partnerships reviewed here can help reshape public resources—to better meet free choice learning needs in our rapidly changing cultural and technological environment.
Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).
About This Report
In the summer of 2000, the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), under the acting direction of Beverly Shepherd, awarded a grant to the Urban Libraries Council to conduct a research project to explore partnerships among cultural and educational institutions engaged in informal lifelong learning. This research was carried out in support of a new direction for IMLS, which, in addition to supporting partnerships among its traditional museum and library constituents, invited public television and public radio to join in collaborative efforts to expand lifelong learning opportunities. These efforts have included research and demonstration projects as well as several convocations of researchers, funders, and executives and staff of museums, libraries, and public radio and public television stations.
This report is part of the broadening national dialogue around informal lifelong learning, which we refer to as "free choice" learning. The report is based on the results of survey and field research into partnerships among libraries, museums, and public broadcasters. It also draws on the growing body of published case material describing the activities and outcomes of such partnerships.
Its core value is use of a conceptual framework that explores, for the four institutions that are our focus—public libraries, museums, public radio, and public television—the contributions, benefits, and risks of partnering across different types of activities. We build on the extensive case research done before us, and take a further look at a wide variety of activities carried out in practice. In addition, we make use of an extensive survey of adults 18 years or older; a survey of library, museum, and public broadcast station executives and staff; and information from field investigations in seven communities—covering partnerships among libraries, museums, and public broadcasters across 26 projects.
Readers can find more collaborative project information on the searchable database located on the Urban Libraries Council website: www.urbanlibraries.org.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank George D'Elia, Director of the Center for Applied Research in Library and Information Science at the State University of New York at Buffalo for use of the survey data he
collected as part of this project, and Robin Redford for her help in field data collection. We thank Joey Rodger and Danielle Patrick Milam of the Urban Libraries Council for their insights, support, and sound advice, which made this publication substantially better than it would have been otherwise.
We thank our Advisory Panel--Ellsworth Brown (Carnegie Library and Museums of Pittsburgh), Martín Gómez (Friends of San Francisco Library), Barbara Gubbin (Houston Public Library), Jim
Fellows (Hartford Gunn Institute), Irene Hirano (Japanese-American Museum), Dan Bradbury (Kansas City Public Library), and Steve Salyer (Public Radio International)--for their good company and good counsel.
And we thank the many local museum, library, public television, and public radio staff members for their contributions of time and talent to this effort.
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