Introduction

I’d like to welcome you to a beautiful spring day in Chicago. We planned it on April’s Fool’s Day and we were fooled. My name is Glenn Scharfenorth. I’m the Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at DePaul University formerly Librarian at DePaul—and at heart, still a librarian—welcoming you to this conference which is run jointly by the various groups that are listed in your program. As you know the theme of the conference is “Coordinating Cooperative Collection Development: A National Perspective.” As we can see by the attendance, this is a very popular subject at this point in academic libraries. We have representation from 32 states, and enrollment to date (at the moment) is 174. We are very pleased with this turnout and hope that all of you will benefit from the conference. Our work here in Illinois has shown a need for a conference such as this and we hope it will benefit us as well as those attending.