Trends in Cooperative Ventures Among College Libraries

ELEVENYEARS AGO, Eileen Thornton presented an analysis of cooperation among college libraries. Of financial and other statistics, she had presented, Thornton wrote: “The pertinence of these data to a study of cooperation on the college level is this: staffing is minimal, money so meager that it must go into bread-andbutter materials, and collections often too small for the demands placed upon them. There are outstanding exceptions in every category, but the broad picture is one of small institutions with small libraries, spattered across the map of the country.”’ She summarized: “Characteristically there are few satisfactory instances of worth-while cooperation among the lesser libraries, at least there are few reported instances of successful cooperation.” Seven years ago, Helen-Jean Moore wrote on the cooperative efforts of five academic libraries in Pittsburgh: “Each entity is fundamentally concerned with providing for its own students, faculty, and staff, and since these individuals have to use similar sources for their results in knowledge, each of the five libraries is spending a large percentage of its funds yearly to buy exactly the same books, periodicals, and documents as are purchased by the four neighboring institutions and a large percentage of its annual budget to provide parallel services.” From this situation, Moore goes on to describe the positive movement toward cooperation which had been made;4 so, it astounds one to read in 1967 that, “The Pittsburgh plan apparently floundered when each institution went into more and more areas where library agreements had already been reached.” 6 Trends in college library cooperation today differ slightly from those of a decade ago. Before attempting to identify these trends, a sketch