"Early scholars were at the mercy of librarians and library owners who guarded their collections well and maintained close control over access. Information about libraries and collections was sketchy and spread by word of mouth. To gain access to materials in a library, scholars had to travel to the library, and were expected to use the resources on site." ~ Thomas Kilpatrick
"In the best of all possible worlds, all materials germane to a scholarly project would be in a scholar's own library, and if not there, at the institution closest to the scholar, but this is not the best of all possible worlds. Some materials are unique, and others scarce. Some of these materials are scattered among different libraries. Even in a world characterized by plentiful financial resources, sharing of materials among different libraries would be necessary." ~ Michael Carpenter
"The consequences of reducing purchasing power are homogeneous collections across the county and a loss of richness and depth in the national collection." ~ Peggy Johnson
"It is generally recognized that in an era of shrinking budgets and proliferation of information, resource sharing among libraries is essential." ~ Amy Graham
"The biggest practical challenge facing resource sharing is to convince local patrons that, in the long run, resource sharing is in their own best interests." ~ Robert Miller
"A book borrowed on the strength of a patron request will be used at least once. Think of all the books that you buy without that guarantee." ~ anon.
"When governing authorities or funders press for increased cooperation, they are usually planning on reducing existing budgets."
"There are limits, however, to what the libraries can afford to do: when a library lacks funds to buy everything requested by faculty and students of its own institution, it cannot buy too many books that they may never use, even though the national interest may clearly call for having these books in the country." ~ Edwin Williams
"People are attracted to collaboration because of an idea, and they leave -- often disgruntled -- because of the reality. The live experience of trying to collaborate usually is nothing like what we imagine collaborating will be like. There is a tremendous tension between collaboration as an ideal and as a lived experience. Collaborating is difficult, frustrating work." ~ Thomas A. Peters
"It requires a mind-set that we have one very large library instead of separate campus libraries that cooperate." ~ Deborah A. Carver
"The percentage of print books cataloged in WorldCat that are held by five or fewer libraries is 66 percent." ~ Lorcan Dempsey
"Traditionally, librarians have identified the most important books within particular subject areas by relying, at least partly, on lists of the titles most often held by other libraries." ~ William H. Walters
The Copyright Clearance Center is the primary source for securing permissions for copyrighted works. It is also the best source to use when it is necessary to pay for the use of copyrighted content.
ILLWeb is "a gateway to electronic and print resources pertaining to all aspects of ILL." Note especially the codes and guidelines section. Absolutely essential for anyone concerned with ILL.
The Sharing and Transforming Access to Resources Section [STARS] of ALA brings together librarians, and library staff involved with ILL, document delivery, remote circulation, access services, cooperative reference, cooperative collection development, remote storage, and other shared library services.
The University of Texas System has an excellent website devoted to intellectual property issues, including ILL.
Resources have been shared since the beginning of writing on documents that were portable. Much of this sharing has been informal. Readers and collectors share resources by borrowing and lending. For a very long time, there have been curses and complaints about those who borrow and fail to return the borrowed item. Today, a very large number of readers, viewers, and listeners share items from their personal collections with P2P sharing of music being a well-known example.
Libraries have shared items from their collections for many years, but usually on an item by item special circumstance basis. Many medieval monastic libraries added to their collections by borrowing works, copying them, and then returning the original (or sometimes the copy!). By nature, many librarians are altruistic and pleased to share resources. Today, inter-library-loan (ILL) is the best-known and most heavily used method of resource sharing. Although library collections are becoming more homogeneous, even smaller academic libraries often have more than half of their collection as unique titles in their area or region.
Museums and galleries have long loaned items from their collections and sometimes whole collections for touring exhibits. This allows a museum to reach many people who would not be able to go to the collection. These exhibitions make money for the lending museum as well as add notably to their visibility and reputation.
A common traditional alternative to borrowing materials for another collection is to arrange for the user to visit that collection and use the material there. This can be costly in time, effort, and out-of-pocket costs, but it does allow for browsing and directed use of the collection.
Each information agency needs to have a core collection of items that are quickly available to users. These are the most frequently used items to meet most user needs.
That the best collection is the largest collection is a "truth" that needs to be questioned. The best collection is the one that has "the right item for the right person at the right time." Large collections may be the best or they may not be; it depends on the nature of the items that result in the large size. It is often harder to find the right item in a large collection. The notion that the largest collection is the best collection does not encourage resource-sharing.
Another myth is that ownership guarantees access. This is not true. An "owned" item may be unavailable for several reasons. In some libraries, a relatively large number of ILL requests are for items owned but unavailable. For example, periodical issues are unavailable while at the bindery.
Sometimes misinformation about resource-sharing creates problems. There is "no free lunch." A library, for example, cannot refuse to budget for collection development and then borrow the material that its users want or need. Successful resource-sharing requires:
Resource-sharing depends upon intellectual access. Many special collections are not adequately cataloged. Many research agencies have acquired items that have yet been cataloged. This is often true of items likely to be of marginal interest to most users. Without proper access, items cannot be shared. These are "invisible" or hidden collections.
Although commonly believed, the assumption that large research libraries have all the good stuff, and that smaller libraries have little of value is not true. For example, in Tennessee the University of Tennessee Libraries is a net borrower even though it is the largest research library in the state. Collection overlap studies have found that a relatively large percentage of titles, perhaps as much as 60 percent in some research libraries, are unique and not duplicated elsewhere. In the study of popular culture, for example, public library collections often contain many items not available in academic libraries. Every library has some unique resources.
Related to the above assumption is the notion that resource sharing makes sense only between the same type of library. For example, state universities tend to borrow from other state universities. While it is true that most resource sharing is between the same type of library, the type of library approach may not be as effective as a regional one that brings together collections from different types of libraries that are located reasonably near each other.
Users strongly prefer to have local access to the content they require. Considerable effort is required, and continuing effort too, to develop a "network culture" among users, especially since some librarians are not yet comfortable with it.
"Resource sharing means arranging for the sharing of current or existing as well as future materials and resources. Resource sharing is based upon some sense of equity so that all benefit; there are no winners and no losers.
There appear to be several major purposes:
The Farmington Plan and the Center for Research Libraries discussed briefly below, are good examples of purpose one. Regional consortia, such as that between UT, Kentucky, and Vanderbilt, that hope to contain periodical costs by insuring that only one copy of some titles is available to the members is a good example of purpose two. The many union catalogs, and, more recently, the North American Collections Inventory Project(NCIP) is a good example of purpose three. The OCLC WorldCat database, though developed to reduce technical services costs, also functions as a key ingredient in identification and retrieval of items from distant collections. The New England Depository Library, established in 1942. was designed to reduce storage costs via a cooperative (shared) storage facility.
Inter-library loan has been successful for many years and is more popular today than before. In 1885, the Smithsonian published the earliest national union list for scientific and technical periodicals. As other groups of libraries followed, especially in the 1920s, union lists or catalogs soon became essential to identify where particular periodical issues were held. Once access was established, resource sharing began to prosper.
The Library of Congress began the National Union Catalog in 1901. In 1916, the ALA developed the first inter-library loan code. The Union List of Serials in Libraries of the United States and Canada issued in 1927 was an especially notable achievement. In the 1950s, a standard inter-library loan form was developed. A model ILL code for regional and other groups of libraries was created in 1968. An ILL procedures manual was written and shared in 1970.
The Library of Congress began its card distribution service in 1901 and instituted a Cooperative Cataloging Division in 1927 to share cataloging information among research libraries. These developments greatly improved intellectual access to items in distant collections and stimulated the development of union catalogs.
While photo duplication equipment had been available for some time, the relatively inexpensive and easy to operate electrostatic equipment available in the 1960s revolutionized photo duplication. In the 1980s, fax machines were used to send scanned articles and chapters. More recently, hard copy content is scanned and sent digitally. Digital content is sent digitally.
OCLC introduced its on-line ILL system in 1979 and other systems by RLG, WLN, and DOCLINE followed. These revolutionized ILL processing by making borrowing requests systematic, easy and fast. In 1990, the RLG introduced its own digital imaging software will allowed articles to be sent via the Internet. In 1995, OCLC introduced a fee management system making billing and payment much easier.
In recent years, because of the increased availability of information about new items from periodical databases and the WWW, ILL requests have increased for many libraries. On-line public access catalogs, including WorldCat make it easy to discover which library has what. It is likely that the increased availability of full-text periodical articles will reduce ILL traffic in the near future.
ILL typically accounts for two to eight percent of a library's circulation. Typically, more than half of all ILL requests are for periodical articles. There would undoubtedly be more requests if ILL service was made more visible and if fees were reduced. Many library users are unaware of resource sharing possibilities and how it has improved over the years. Still, borrowing hard copy materials, even with a delivery service, involves a wait.
For a major research library, requests will need to be sent to a relatively large number of libraries to secure items not widely available. For example, in 2000 Virginia Tech borrowed more than 28,000 books and articles from about 1,100 libraries.
Even with the advances of technology, ILL work remains labor-intensive, expensive, and somewhat slow. ILL has become more efficient in the past few years with costs declining and turnaround time substantially reduced. Staff are responsible for about two-thirds of ILL costs. About one-half of the borrowing and two-thirds of the lending involve photo duplication and this process is substantially reduced by the availability of full-text databases and digital articles. However, OCLC data indicates that about half of all article requests are for items older than ten years and many full-text databases have minimal retrospective coverage.
A major concern for those libraries participating in ILL is how to protect lending libraries from "overuse." A library that lends more than it borrows, is a net lender. Being a net lender could mean that your institution is being taken advantage of. An increasing number of lending libraries now charge a fee to recapture costs associated with lending and (sometimes) to discourage lending. About 90 percent of all ARL libraries now charge a fee beyond the cost of supplying the item (postage, photocopy). Often, ILL staff search for the free or low cost lender. Groups of libraries, consortia, often create resource-sharing agreements to eliminate fees associated with lending/borrowing except for postage and copying. This works well IF most of the items needed can be supplied from within the group.
Quite a few public libraries, as in South Dakota, have enabled patron initiated ILL. This works best when the originating library is within a system and the user identifies the desired item as available elsewhere on the system. Thus bibliographic verification and holding verification is not needed. The patron finds the desired item, determines its status at the lending library, and initiates the request. When verification is needed, requests are normally held in a queue until verified by a library staff member. This process eliminates paper forms, minimizes the need for bibliographic verification, and speeds up the time it takes to borrow an item. An ARL study [college and research libraries] found that user-initiated ILL cost less, had higher fill rates, and quicker turn-around times than mediated ILL.
Copyright is often cited as a problem in sharing resources. This is likely to be much more of a problem in the future when libraries lease rather than own more and more of the material provided to users. Unless included in the contract, a library may not copy leased content and share it. Here is a quick and dirty look at copyright for owned items.
In general, borrowing (or purchasing) articles is more cost-effective if a periodical is used less than five times per year. If used ten times per use, a subscription may be more cost-effective.
RLG's SHARES, its interlibrary lending and document delivery component has moved to a completely distributed, peer-to-peer networking environment [P2P] and it will be interesting to see if others use this new approach.
An alternative to inter-library loan receiving more attention is on-demand collection development. Some research libraries have found purchasing the desired item to be less expensive than borrowing and perhaps quicker if ordered on a rush basis from vendor or publisher.
Here a document is any intellectual property that can be shared so that "document" is not restricted by format, subject, or issuing agency. The document may be tangible or digital. Still, most documents are copies of hard copy periodical articles or technical reports. Inter-library loan is a form of document delivery, but it usually means delivery of a needed item from a traditional, library source. According to Ronald Dekker and Leo Waaijers, successful document delivery requires:
Some document delivery services are for-profit and have include rights usage agreements with publishers. Royalties are paid. Some academic and special libraries and many scientific and technical agencies use these providers instead of ILL because the fill rate is high (Uncover about 87%), service is faster and is not much more expensive. It may be easier for users to go directly to a provider on a web and submit a request (accompanied by credit card info) than to do the same thing via a library. UNCOVER is the best known of the document delivery services used by libraries. Infotrieve is a newer firm using the "blocks of docs" system. Libraries purchase blocks of documents at a known fixed cost, i.e. 100 articles for $2600 ($26.00 each). In contrast, some academic research libraries say that a typical ILL request costs about $20.00, but not all indirect costs may be included in that amount.
While the fees charged by these services may seem steep, consider:
In 1994, the mean ILL request cost about $30.00 with $19.00 for the borrowing library and $11.00 for the lending library. Nearly 75 percent of these costs are in staff time.
A joint-use partnership is an agreement between two libraries of different types to provide access to collections and services at a single site in a single building. While there are several possibilities, the most common are:
A consortium is a "community (a cooperative) of two or more information agencies which have formally agreed to coordinate, cooperate in, or consolidate certain functions" to achieve mutual objectives. Consortia may be formed on a local, regional, or larger basis; on a functional, type, or format basis; or on a subject basis." As Hirshon says, "These new consortia are not simply purchasing clubs. The most successful consortia represent an institutional strategic alliance in which a heightened level of resource sharing binds the member institutions together."
In the beginning, consortia focused on ILL and document delivery service based on union catalogs and locally held resources. Retrospective conversion and preservation initiatives followed. Today, emphasis is on buying [really leasing] cooperatives, influencing policy, specifically scholarly publication patterns, research and development to improve content delivery and standards for developing and managing collections[often through grants], and expanding access to specialized resources.
A key ingredient in any successful consortial arrangement in the Memorandum of Understanding or MOU. Essential elements here would include:
Consortia have existed for nearly 100 years in the United States and there may be as many as 500 different consortia involving academic libraries. The number is increasing. Typically, consortia do these things:
The most visible purpose of most consortia is the selection of digital materials and bargaining with vendors to secure a "best price" for member institutions. One estimate is that these items might cost as much as five times higher without the power of cooperative buying. It is much more difficult in time and effort for an individual library to secure the best price and the best conditions for use and users.
While most frequently thought of in terms of a purchasing cooperative or agent, consortia are often useful for creating a formal structure for resource-sharing and improved management with contractual obligations for each participant. Collaborative collection development might take place within a consortia so that certain institutions agree to develop, maintain, and provide access to specific collections. Sometimes this is called distributed collection development. The library hosting such a collection becomes the library of record because it has primary collecting responsibility for a given subject.
The more decentralized the consortium, the greater the autonomy of individual members. However, more centralized consortia are likely be more effective -- perhaps because of larger and more effective staff. Consortia might be placed in these categories:
Several factors are associated with successful consortia, but the most important is to begin small, gain administrative support, and build on success:
Several factors are associated with failure:
"Cooperative collection development means arranging for the acquisition and sharing of future materials and resources." This would include both the selection and purchase of new items and the retention of those already acquired.
Collaborative collection development is a relatively recent phenomena, becoming visible after World War Two. The first notable article, by Ernest Richardson, appeared in Library Journal in 1899 ("Cooperation and Lending Among College and Research Libraries"). The next major landmark was the trip of Walter Liechtenstein to South America in 1913-14 on behalf of several academic libraries. In the 1930s, the Triangle Research Libraries Network of North Carolina developed an acquisition plan to minimize duplication among the three libraries [UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, NC State].
The Second World War clearly demonstrated that the United States lacked essential information on many foreign countries, especially developing ones. The Farmington Plan, begun in 1948 and ended in 1972, attempted to solve this problem. The Plan was an agreement of about 60 research libraries, sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, so that an agency, usually a research university, would agree to gather one copy of each new publication likely to have research value in the U.S. issued in a certain country and make these items available to others. Such sharing would require shared catalogs or databases, exchange of information on forthcoming purchases, and extending borrowing privileges to others. Other agencies would do the same so that a large number of specialized, relatively comprehensive collections would result. There are obvious problems with dividing knowledge by place of publication except in the case of literature. Too, the notion of one agency and one specialized collection was not popular with researchers who wanted their institution to collect comprehensively in the subjects of their interest. Many Farmington Plan members felt that the costs of participation outweighed the benefits and the Plan died. Still, this was an attractive model and one that would reduce duplication and collection development costs while insuring reasonable physical and intellectual access. The model might work better as a regional rather than a national one.
In 1949, ten Midwestern universities formed the Midwest Inter Library Center which soon changed its name to the Center for Research Libraries, a "library for libraries." CRL selected and made available notable but not heavily used materials that could then be borrowed by member libraries. Doctoral dissertations from European universities and foreign newspapers are examples of this type of material. While membership varies, the Center has been reasonably popular and continues today.
Another country focused approach, but one that was not able to continue, involved cooperation in developing collections of regional literature. The Latin American Acquisitions Project [LACAP], beginning in 1956 and ended in 1972, provided interested libraries an opportunity to cooperate in the selection and acquisition of library materials. Participating libraries shared information, created bibliographies, bought items for one another, and consolidated serials collections for filming.
In 1973, three leading research libraries formed the Research Libraries Group. Here the emphasis was on created a shared database that would provide effective access to a variety of unique collections and a substantial coordinated collection development program. The "Conspectus" discussed earlier in this course was developed under the aegis of the RLG to facilitate resource-sharing. The key to success is a union catalog that allows members of the communities involved to quickly search and request items of interest. The best current example of a technologically sophisticated union catalog is the RLG "RedLight GreenLight" project which contains 40 million descriptions of content from 300 countries in 370 languages and is the successor of the original RLG union catalog.
As the percentage of the collection development funds spent on consortium selections increases, there is less discretionary money available for local purchases. Collection development becomes less a local function and more of an activity done at the consortial level where bundles rather than single titles are selected and purchased.
Collaborative collection development increases access to unique works and reduces duplication in individual collections. If collaborative libraries share the same principal vendor, it is much easier to create "system-wide" collections and reduce unwarranted duplication. A virtual approval plan provides content information about possible purchases that can easily be shared among the typically two or three members of the collaborative.
Successful cooperative collection development requires:
The major problems relate to faculty perception of neglect when collections important to them are developed elsewhere, regardless of delivery time. The major benefits are:
Until recently, many collection oriented consortia have not been successful. Reasons for failure include:
Preconditions for success:
The traditional collection model of providing access via ownership has become less and less viable during the past few decades. With "twigging," there are more and more specialized topics appealing to smaller audiences. There has been an "explosion" of new subjects and new formats. Inexpensive computers, desktop publishing, the Internet, video cams, digital recording hardware/software, and the like make it relatively easy for almost any person or group to create and distribute intellectual products of some quality. The cost of print items, especially serial publications, has increased dramatically, far beyond the ability of the collection developer to pay. The hope of any individual collection to be able to develop and maintain a truly comprehensive collection across several subject areas or discipline clusters has been shattered.
The cost of materials consistently exceeds inflation as measure by the Consumer Price Index. Libraries are selecting less and less of more and more.
User awareness and expectations have also increased. "I want it all and I want it now" may seem silly or capricious to the information professional, but not to many users and potential users. The Internet and the wide-spread availability of large periodical data bases via agency server also stimulates demand for items not locally held. Recent examples include OCLC providing WorldCat records to Yahoo and Google as well as Google's digitization project involving major academic research libraries. The traditional, we can get it for you in a few weeks ILL is unsatisfactory for many users.
The on-line public access catalog, OCLC, and the Internet have dramatically improved control of intellectual property. It is relatively easy for users to identify a desirable item--Amazon.com for example--and then request that item at a local agency. CD-ROM periodical data bases generate a large number of requests for periodical articles not locally available.
Delivery mechanisms have also improved. Reliance on the U.S. mail postal rate (a disappearing phenomenon) has been replaced by fax, email, and Internet delivery which is substantially quicker. In many cases, physical delivery is not required since the full-text of a desired item is in the data base or is available on the web for printing or down-loading.
The political environment, especially for publicly funded information agencies, is grim and those who fund libraries are eager for resource sharing because they assume it will reduce the need for local funding [not the case.]
An assumption is a reasonable belief that is not yet supported by convincing evidence. It may be intuitive. Here are a few assumptions related to resource-sharing:
If taken to an extreme, resource sharing could create the paradox of nothing being available as each collection developer waited for another to acquire a title and make it available.
We have not done a good job of creating an environment where realistic expectations are widely shared and accepted. Providing access can be a complex and difficult business. Certainly, it is much more expensive than most users believe. Copyright, permissions, fees, and contractual arrangements create real barriers to sharing information. Changes in intellectual property legislation favoring publishers and database compilers make our task even more expensive and difficult.
Too often, it is assumed that only large, research-oriented collections have much to share. Some tentative research suggests that small, popular libraries often hold items of value although they are less intellectually accessible.
Allowing core materials for the local community to be developed elsewhere can be a major problem if that other collection is no longer being adequately developed or if access is no longer available. All cooperative agreements are based upon the current situation and that can quickly change.
Those who fund large, comprehensive collections are not always convinced that sharing their resources is appropriate or even ethical. Not all of the "haves" will share with the "have nots." The increase in the number of research collections with transaction fees for ILL is an indication that net lenders feel that they are being disadvantaged.
If every major research university must offer a research degree in Icelandic, it will be difficult to convince local faculty to rely on a distant collection for needed materials. Faculty will want their Icelandic collection to be the comprehensive one. Duplication of research interests makes it difficult to move toward the more exclusive, specialized collections (as in the Farmington Plan). Continued emphasis on collection size as a measure of collection goodness is also a negative factor in relying on cooperative collection development.
Copyright is not as much of a barrier as is the difficulty in securing permission to use copyrighted material for a reasonable fee. Guidelines, widely followed, focus only on content published within the last five years. Lending libraries are limited to "no more than one article per journal issue or five articles per journal title during a single year. When these limits are exceeding, royalties must be paid. Permissions are often difficult to secure, often take an unreasonable time, and fees are often unreasonable. The Copyright Clearance Center makes it easier to pay appropriate royalties.
Although dramatic progress has been made in the last few decades, we still do not know enough about the contents of particular collections and the availability of items in them. Internet collections are a particular problem with collections that are here today and gone tomorrow.
Lack of money to support equitable cost-sharing is a continuing problem. Net lenders need to receive financial support for their contributions. Without that, more of them will increase their fees or decide not to participate in lending arrangements.
Technology can also be a problem. As libraries replace subscriptions to hard copy periodicals with leased access to digital databases, they no longer own material that they can share.
Education of users must play an important role in creating the environment for more resource sharing. Funders also need to be educated, although it is unlikely that they will be convinced that they should subsidize others who are unwilling to fund their local collection.
Better bibliographic control will result from increased access to better public access on-line catalogs via the Internet. More and more reasonably priced (per user) full-text periodical data bases will provide more immediate access to information formerly not available locally. As more resources are available via web sites, delivery time should continue to decrease.
Increased digital publication, either on-demand from the publisher or distributed via the web, should reduce the costs of creating and distributing intellectual content as well as making distribution much easier and quicker. There is some controversy about this one.
More and better research on collection use should reduce overlap and duplication in collections. More research on information-seeking behavior should result in more effective searching to allow identification of more appropriate items. That should reduce the number of inappropriate requests for material from distant collections.
The centralized model uses one national collection. The Center for Research Libraries, on the University of Chicago campus, is a good example. CRL acquires many unique items not likely to be heavily used in an individual collection and then makes these items available to member libraries.
The national distributed model uses a variety of collections, but provides one access point. The Research Libraries Group is a good example. It provides access to a variety of special collections in North America and Western Europe. The collections are distributed, but access is centralized.
The regional distributed model is limited to collections within a region with each collection agreeing to specialized and develop a comprehensive, shared collection. For example, in the Upper Midwest, the University of Wisconsin acquires books from Norway and Denmark while the University of Minnesota acquires books from Sweden and Finland.
The local distributed model is similar to the regional one above, except it is limited to a local area. The Research Triangle universities in Raleigh - Durham have divided up Africa with Duke and UNC responsible for English and Non-English African material. When collections are relatively close together, it is relatively easy for users to move to the collections as well as move individual items to another location. Collection developers can meet regularly to discuss problems, especially the purchase or cancellation of expensive serials. Local "bottom-up" resource-sharing is likely to be more successful than larger efforts.
Few resource-sharing initiatives other than ILL involve libraries of different types or information agencies of different types. More needs to be done with a variety of agencies at the local level.
The traditional and relatively new methods of resource-sharing mentioned above are likely to continue for some time. It is likely that there will be fewer consortia in the future and these will be more powerful. "We also are witnessing a long-term shifting balance of power and value between institutional collections, meta collections, and personal collections. The academic library, the embodiment of the institutional collection, is losing market share to meta collections and personal collections. ... The value of selecting materials at the title level to add to institutional collections will probably decline into the foreseeable future. [Thomas Peters]"
Resource-sharing focuses on those items beyond the core collection. Select an information agency of your choice. Using appropriate examples, discuss the types of items that would be in the core collection and the types of items that might be borrowed or delivered from an external agency. Exclude "free' sources available via the web from the external category.
You are the information specialist in charge of an information agency of your choice. Justify participation in a resource-sharing initiative where resources from your collection would be shared with others. What are the major arguments in favor of lending and the major arguments against lending?
You are a collection developer or a reference professional in an information agency of your choice. As a cost-saving measure, you have been asked to cancel periodical subscriptions and substitute document delivery of requested articles. What are the major arguments in favor of such a step and the major arguments against it.
You have decided to go forward with the cancellation project. Now you will need to select a document delivery supplier. How would you go about that process? What would you do first? Second?
You would like to establish a cooperative collection development initiative with other similar information agencies in your region. How would you go about that? Research libraries usually begin with expensive periodical subscriptions and sometimes with subjects. Would that be a good place to begin?
Most resource-sharing arrangements involve information agencies of the same type. Identify the benefits and liabilities associated with resource-sharing that involves a variety of agency types. For example, could school library media centers share resources with public libraries?
