ABSTRACT
A difficult problem confronting anyone who attempts to clarify the issues and needs of a local library consortium is the task of defining a “local library consortium” with sufficient precision to permit accurate and useful generalization about its behavior as a generic institutional form of library collaborative activity or networking. It is an unfortunate condition of social science that the entities our literature characterizes as “library networks,” “library consortia,” “library associations,” “library systems,” and “library cooperatives” cannot be studied with the scientific precision of measuring uniform quantities in an environment that is assumed to be uniform. This fact leaves a residue of ambiguity in library thought about networking and its various institutional forms, one of those forms being the local library consortium. As has been observed, “without a clear definition of a network, we tend to visualize the network that serves our library or region.” 1
