Linking up Australia and New Zealand: Trans-Tasman collaboration and the evolving resource sharing ecosystem

Trans Tasman Interlending, a service designed to facilitate resource-sharing between libraries in Australia and New Zealand, was launched in 2006. The service, brokered by the national libraries of Australia and New Zealand, recognised the close cultural ties and long history of national cooperation between the two countries and enabled libraries on both sides of the Tasman to seamlessly request from and supply to one another despite the ocean between them. The service was unique; as it was the first time two national Interloan utilities had been linked. The success of the service was founded on trust and strong collaboration, advancing interoperability between systems via the trans-Tasman gateway on VDX, and leveraged the centralised billing arrangements in both national services. A decade later, however, the technology and infrastructure underpinning resource-sharing services in both countries is ageing, interlibrary lending is decreasing, and a change in technology platform unexpectedly terminated interoperability between the systems. As a result, the sustainability of the agreement was brought into question. This paper explores the evolving resource sharing environment in Australia and New Zealand, in particular the fragmentation of supply options, the shift in technology options, the emergence of new alliances and relationships clustered around vendor-based aggregations, and the increasing globalised nature of resource supply and demand. It reflects on the role of national services as regional hubs for resource sharing and interoperability, and what this means for ongoing regional collaboration in a globalised resource-sharing ecosystem.