Brooke Guthrie and Jason Tomberlin
In mid- August of 2012, the Rubenstein Library at Duke University and Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill launched the first shared instance of Aeon. The “Intersections: Technology and Public Services in Special Collections” symposium marks our fifth anniversary as joint Aeon users and offers an excellent opportunity to reflect on our partnership. We went into this experiment with certain expectations about how we could harness our shared system to the benefit of our users and our institutions. How do these initial goals contrast with our current uses of the system? What are our users’ needs and are we using our chosen tool to effectively meet them? The symposium’s focus on tools and partners provides a chance to take stock of what we’ve learned as partners and discuss how we can better take advantage of our shared system. The number of Aeon users has grown substantially in the past five years and it is our hope that our experience can inform current and future Aeon users.
Duke and UNC, founding members of the oldest academic library consortium in the United States, have long cooperated in many academic endeavors–even if their athletics teams are fierce rivals. The adoption of a shared Aeon user database further strengthened those bonds.
Despite our geographic proximity and history of collaboration, UNC- Chapel Hill, a large, public university, and Duke University, a small, private university, are very different institutions and this difference is reflected in their libraries. A recent effort to redesign and update our shared Aeon web pages highlighted these differences and the challenges of inter-institutional cooperation. Fortunately, this experience also highlighted the opportunities of our unique partnership and suggested strategies for further collaboration in the future.