ABSTRACT
Stock markets closed, banks failed, companies folded. International bailouts were necessary to prevent worldwide disaster. Librarians are now very familiar with the trends that have so affected library collections budgets and purchasing patterns over the past two decades. Libraries know what the alternative to responding locally is, and have in fact engaged in numerous cooperative collection development efforts over the years. The ARL Foreign Acquisitions Project acknowledged the difficulty of cooperation, but also recognized that the rise of new information technologies afforded “an unprecedented opportunity to rethink the ways research libraries manage global resources and to fashion cooperative strategies for ensuring the success of the aggregate holdings.” The primary goal of the Global Resources Program is “to improve access to international research resources and to help libraries contain costs, especially through the establishment of models of distributed collecting and the use of technology”.
