ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION: COOPERATION AS PARADIGM, PANACEA, AND PROBLE
Cooperation among North American libraries has a checkered past. Every clear-cut success, for example the National Union Catalog or the Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO), seems to be offset by an effort of at best ambiguous results, say the Farmington Plan or the Conspectus.1 The rhetoric proclaiming a new library paradigm of cooperative collection development, of "access rather than ownership," remains in the ascendant. Nonetheless, many of today's most promising initiatives are still built more around bibliographic technol-
ogy than library collections, and around newly-created joint ventures rather than the institutions already in place. It's comforting to think that our latest effort has finally cracked the problem of collections cooperation, perhaps through improved bibliographic control and arrangements for interlibrary loan, or more carefully planned acquisitions programs, or even widespread digitization. But the historical record reveals a stutter-step process that deserves a more cautious approach.
