The most important distinguishing characteristic of the repositories in the group is their primary, dominant function as a provider of storage and access services. While their content priorities and user communities may vary, all of these organizations exist to acquire, preserve, and make available some class of information. This characteristic shapes most relationships with users and information providers, as well as the access practices employed. The library that is part of larger government (Washington) does have long term institutional relationships with many users and providers. However, it does not share the same mission and program goals of the other government agencies and the staff generally does not share professional identity and educational backgrounds. The relationships among the other libraries and their user/provider environments are much less institutional in nature, and may be ad hoc or short term in many instances, and may be strictly commercial. That is, in some cases, the library is simply a vendor, providing data for sale. Thus the relationships can be more market-like than a community or network of organizations. Where long term relationships are developed and maintained, they tend to be for the purpose of enhancing the quality of the information received or for improvements in the access processes rather that the pursuit of some policy objective.

The NASA Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) is a library of a narrower kind, but still similar to the other members of this group. The GCMD exists to acquire and provide access to information—in this case metadata. It has long and short-term relationships with the providers of this information, but the relationships are seldom statutory. And while potentially very large, there is no particular common identity or organizational linkage to the users of this resource, or for the very wide range of data sets accessible through the GCMD.

The range of information acquired by these libraries varies considerably. The Washington State Library is the most eclectic of the group, with its very broad mission to serve as, "the corporate library for Washington State Government, ... deliver information services to the legislature and state government entities as they develop and carry out public policy; and [as] a leader in information policy, ... partner with libraries and other entities to provide ready and equitable public access to information."⁷ This broad mission means that this library deals with the highly varied materials produced in the course of Washington State government, both historically and currently. By contrast, the other members of the group have narrower missions in support of specific research communities and constituencies, dealing primarily with scientific and demographic information and statistical data sets.

The organizational structures and mission of these libraries require responses somewhat different from the community-type arrangements described above. The large number and diversity of potential suppliers of information to these libraries presents problems of acquisition management. These library-type repositories lack the close linkages and controls in a strictly government or institutional context. These libraries therefore must devote resources to managing the way suppliers present information to reduce problems arising from missing or low quality metadata, problematic formats, and other data quality and usability factors. As a result this group was the most heavily invested in proactive acquisition strategies. Libraries must also accommodate a variety of users with wide-ranging skills and technology resources, as well as disparate goals and information needs. Since providing access is central to their mission, however, as a group they devote substantial attention to working effectively with various user needs and capabilities.