Cooperative Efforts of Libraries

Explore a wide variety of cooperative initiatives—at regional, statewide, and international levels!

This book examines a wide variety of cooperative efforts and consortia in libraries, both geographically and in terms of such activities as digitization and cooperative reference services. You'll learn how libraries are cooperating regionally, on the statewide level, and internationally to provide better service to all kinds of users. Cooperative Efforts of Libraries explores aspects of cooperation that include remote storage, virtual reference service, collection development, staff training and instruction, preservation, interlibrary loan, and international cooperation in Latin America and the Caribbean.

From the editors: “Cooperation used to mean primarily cataloging via OCLC, interlibrary loan, and perhaps mutual borrowing privileges, but economics and technology are combining to broaden the playing field considerably. This collection reflects this diversity.”

Part one of Cooperative Efforts of Libraries highlights cooperation in regional and statewide activity. You'll learn about:

• Metro, a multitype cooperative designed to coordinate the implementation of virtual reference among libraries in New York City
• cooperation between remote, rural, and isolated libraries in the Northern Great Plains and Rocky Mountain West regions, including the creation of the Online Dakota Information Network (ODIN) and similar organizations
• a Virtual Library of Virginia project in which the highly specialized skills of librarians were used to enhance vendor-supplied MARC records for a much more accessible full-text database
• the efforts of each university within the state system in Florida to contribute digitized versions of rare and specialized Floridiana to a joint electronic collection which is available to everyone in the state
• a centrally funded project to support the information literacy efforts of librarians at each campus of the California State University System and make all of them available at the other campus libraries
• a joint collection development project within the state universities and community and technical colleges of Minnesota the successful lobbying effort which brought them a $3 million annual supplement to cooperatively redress past underfunding for collections
• the history of resource sharing in Louisiana, Illinois, and Texas—detailed and extensive analyses

Part two of Cooperative Efforts of Libraries presents a sampling of the wide variety of cooperative efforts that make libraries so unusual among institutions and librarians so unusual among professionals. In this section, the President of the Center for Research Libraries discusses the increasing cost and physical constraints that make it difficult for hundreds of libraries to store and preserve print copies of the same research materials. This section also examines:

• a collaborative digital reference project among three small liberal arts college libraries in New England
• the history of cooperative collection development among three Pennsylvania college libraries
• the University of Kansas Libraries' efforts to establish cooperative education programs to microfilm brittle books and create microform masters of embrittled volumes—which are then made available for sale to other libraries
• an American university's offer of interlibrary access to the students and faculty of an Armenian university where resources are severely limited
• the challenges of providing interlibrary loan in Latin America
• the planning of an international summit cosponsored by the Southeast Florida Library Information Network, a regional multitype cooperative in South Florida, and IFLA, designed to lay the groundwork for further cooperative efforts between U.S. libraries and libraries in Latin America and the Caribbean