Present & Future
The Rethinking Resource Sharing Initiative (RRSI) will be restarting during the Fall 2025-Spring 2026, after an extended hiatus following the pandemic. With the help of Lars Leon (University of Kansas) before his retirement, a small group of committed people in the resource sharing community organized in August 2025 and will soon engage with the resource sharing community. We are calling ourselves the RRSI Rebooting Team:
- Jen Salvo, University of Missouri-Kansas City
- Brynne Norton, University of Maryland
- Clara Fehrenbach, University of Chicago
- Tom Bruno, Princeton University
- Mark Sullivan, SUNY Geneseo
Keep an eye on this website for more information about this group’s progress.
History
The Rethinking Resource Sharing Initiative is an ad hoc group that advocates for a complete rethink of the way libraries conduct resource sharing in the context of the global internet revolution and all of the developments that have arisen from that.
The initiative started in the U.S. in 2005 with a white paper written by a group of librarians, product vendors and library technology specialists. While working on revising resource sharing technical standards, they began to feel as though they were trying to improve a protocol that was becoming increasingly obsolete. It was rather like refining the typewriter protocol when the world had already moved on to the computer. And more importantly, resource sharing practices and policies continued to be library-centric while the rest of the world had already moved on to being consumer-centric.
Thus, the group felt it was time to wipe the slate completely clean and start over with some new concepts. A charter was written and a revolution born!
The participants in the Rethinking Resource Sharing Initiative hope that you will join us in advocating for a revolution in the way libraries conduct resource sharing. The initiative enjoys a joint custody arrangement including partnerships among a number of organizations.