To share and share alike: The basic ground rules for inter-institutional data sharing
✍ Scribed by James F. Trainer
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1996
- Weight
- 591 KB
- Volume
- 1996
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0271-0579
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Colleges and universities, and the individual administrators, faculty, and staff members associated with them, belong to many organizations and participate in numerous inter-institutional arrangements. The 1996 Higher Education Directory, for instance, contains information on 303 Higher Education Associations and another 106 Consortia of Institutions of Higher Education, excluding statewide agencies of Higher Education (Higher Education Publications, 1995). Undoubtedly, many other groups exist beyond these, because presumably the listings in the Higher Education Drectory are restricted to groups that are formally organized. Regardless of whether they are formally organized or not, however, associations and consortia exist to meet the collective needs of their institutional members. We are all familiar with many of these groups. Among the organizations most familiar to us are the disciplinary societies to which individual faculty members belong and the Washington, D.C.-based associations that represent the political interests of institutions. However, the Higher Education Drectory listings also include organizations focused on student and faculty exchanges, cross-course registration arrangements, interlibrary loans, and purchasing cooperatives, to name but a few examples.
These activities are not a recent phenomenon. Contemporary interinstitutional efforts are extensions of a cooperative practice that began as early as 1925 with the collaboration of the Claremont Colleges and rapidly increased in momentum in the early 1960s as a result of the discussions aimed to foster collaboration among higher education institutions (Patterson, 1974). (See Patterson's work for a typology of consortial arrangements and profiles of nearly ninety consortial efforts that existed as of 1974.