ABSTRACT
The first actual cooperative librarianship in America can be traced to the founding of the American Library Association (ALA) in 1876 and other significant developments such as those made by Charles Ami Cutter and Melvil Dewey. Establishment of the ALA focused on cooperation among libraries and librarians, particularly to share resources and professional expertise. The eighties concentrated on distributing computing power to the user through the development of cheaper, making both individual personal computers and local area network servers widely affordable. The eighties also brought the earliest forms of new systems design architectures for the individual library system as well as the bibliographic utility. There are a number of significant issues that libraries face and that also affect library cooperative ventures, particularly as these develop, grow in scope and mature in operation. The cost of technical processing and the increase in numbers of items to be processed were the original impetus for early cooperative groups, some of which failed.
