Outsourcing And The Construction Of Core Competence Of University Libraries

Outsourcing is an innovative cooperation management method which can be dated back to the industry cooperation in the 1980's. Outsourcing mainly concerns the completion of operational activities and services by outsourcing the tasks to external cooperation or groups in order to decrease the cost, save time, improve efficiency and quality. At the same time, the core operation and a higher task objective can be achieved more tentatively and effectively through outsourcing. After been widely applied in the field of cooperation trust management, outsourcing became one of the most widely accepted ways of library management.The author provided an in-depth discussion outsourcing in university libraries, and the methodology applied in this paper included: literature search, questionnaire, survey and comparative study. This paper is comprised of four parts.Initially this paper systematically analyzed theories related to library outsourcing, such as the connotation, content, major model and the status quo of library outsourcing both in China and abroad.The paper continued with further analysis on the practical implementation of outsourcing in university libraries. Based on the analysis of both positive and negative influences brought by library outsourcing, the author explained in detail the risks of outsourcing of university libraries, and elaborated on risk management issue.In the third section, the paper investigated the general practices, necessity and feasibility of catalogue outsourcing of university libraries in China and abroad. Important elements of catalogue outsourcing in university libraries were identified and analyzed. Besides, the paper also selected samples from United States, Canada, and Taiwan university libraries to compare their similarities and difference in order to illuminate on the practices in China.Finally, suggestions on the construction of the core competence of university libraries were provided. The author specially focused on the optimization of operation, reconstruction of organization, reasonable allocation of human resource, and effective adjustment of system resource of university libraries after outsourcing.