Introduction

The old cliche about cooperation being “an unnatural act” does not apply to librarians, to judge from the articles in this collection. Indeed, just the opposite seems to be the case; librarians, regardless of where they are, always seem to generate a wide variety of cooperative activities locally, regionally, nationally, and even internationally, in the process creating a bewildering array of organizations and acronyms. Over and over again, the readers of this volume will see librarians coming together in ways that would simply not occur in other fields. The truth of that observation was brought home to me several years ago during one of our quarterly meetings of the state university system library directors in Florida. At this particular meeting, we decided to invite a faculty member from each institution to discuss collection development issues with us. One of those faculty members, the chair of a history department, said “You librarians are light years ahead of us. It would never even occur to the state university system history department chairs to meet about common issues.”