Resource Sharing in the Electronic Era: Potentials and Paradoxes

EFFECTIVE AND EFFICIENT RESOURCE SHARING, a long time goal of libraries, is at last becoming a reality in many current and planned projects. Access to OPACs and the development of rapid delivery systems are changing the way information can be delivered. At the same time, traditional interlibrary loan remains a strategic service. The social, economic, and technological complexities of both the new mechanisms and the traditional roles of libraries provide both opportunities for cooperation and paradoxes for the continuation of selection, archiving, and preservation of paper collections. Today’s libraries face myriad challenges: social, economic, technical, organizational, and functional. One of the biggest challenges, however, is the rapid rate at which all of these factors are changing, their interdependence, and the effects that we see in our attempt to maintain, much less increase, information services. In 1986, the ALA Commission on Freedom and Equality of Access to Information wrote that: “Libraries of all types today find themselves caught between the anvil of growing citizen demand for increased access to a broader range of information resources in a wider variety of formats and the hammer of declining financial support” (ALA, 1984, p. 99). They were reflecting the then rapid rate of change, but not even that august body could have imagined the rapidity and variety of developments in today’s information society. Gay N. Dannelly, Collection Development, The Ohio State University Libraries, 1858 Neil Avenue Mall, Columbus, OH 43210-1286 LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 43, No. 4, Spring 1995, pp. 663-78