Creating New Strategies for Cooperative Collection Development

Book excerpt: Ensure the success of your library’s cooperative collection development plan! This solidly researched book brings a fresh perspective to the practical problems of library resource sharing. Creating New Strategies for Cooperative Collection Development offers shrewd advice and creative thinking on the political and administrative issues that often present obstacles. It will help you assess your library’s situation, identify new opportunities, and find powerful new ways to perform the essential tasks of archiving, preservation, and digitization. By making wise use of new technologies, local libraries can offer international resources and services unimaginable just a few decades ago. Creating New Strategies for Cooperative Collection Development shares the experiences of successful consortia all over the world, including the US, Eastern Europe, the UK, the nations of the Pacific Rim, and South Asia. It examines the costs and benefits of regional, national, and international cooperatives and debates the varying uses of centered and decentralized models of resource sharing. Creating New Strategies for Cooperative Collection Development offers practical advice for overcoming specific obstacles, including: lengthy approval processes fixation on volume count instead of quality faculty and commercial resistance to reforming scholarly communications publishing monopolies and rising prices Creating New Strategies for Cooperative Collection Development defines the issues that need to be addressed by the library community to foster the advancement of cooperative collection development and suggests a series of steps that can be taken to ensure its future success and continued growth. It is an essential guide to the world of resource sharing.