Cooperative Efforts of Libraries

Citation

James, S. (2005), "Cooperative Efforts of Libraries", Library Review, Vol. 54 No. 7, pp. 435-436. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530510611938

“Cooperative efforts”: so, is all the effort worthwhile? Given the sheer amount and range of LIS cooperation around the world one is entitled to assume that it must be very worthwhile, and indeed just about all the evidence emphasises that point. And the worth can be on at least three levels: benefit to the services and practitioners taking part; benefit to the paymasters who get better value for money; and the sine qua non, benefit to users who receive a better, wider, or deeper service than the individual library can provide. I have discovered from my own collaborative activities over many years that the benefits of a well conceived and true collaboration can be far greater than the sum of its parts.

We can and do collaborate at numerous levels and in an enormous variety of circumstances and applications. The circumstances vary from country to country and region to region, sometimes from town to town, for geographical, social, economic and various other reasons (including personality clashes of course). But underlying the differences are common approaches, common aims, common problems (not always common solutions) and common benefits from cooperation in almost any circumstance or location.

The useful thing about these Haworth Press publications is usually that they bring together descriptions and discussions of various specific projects or services; and so it is here. Nine articles deal with projects at a regional or state level, and a further eight take a range of “thematic” projects (a couple on shared preservation, one on shared storage another on collaborative digital reference, for example). That the examples are exclusively from the USA does not necessarily invalidate the publication for the rest of us: shared preservation and collaborative storage are issues in Scotland so there is value (and some envy at comparative levels of resources) in seeing how others do it. Similarly, among the regional examples there are practices we might learn something from, even if what we learn is to appreciate how much more cross‐sectorally some of us are able to work in other parts of the world than seems apparent in the USA, and how much freedom we have from bureacracy by comparison with some of the schemes described. That is all part of our various underlying circumstances.

This is a useful practical collection of articles for those engaged in or planning various kinds of collaboration. There is plenty of technical data and plenty of detail for us to work on, very much like being given a set of technical reports from the various projects covered. The one down‐side of cooperation is the plethora (and sometimes the nature) of acronyms spawned by various projects: this publication has a useful index to locate (and help identify) acronyms, names and, of course, topics. The editors’ introductions to the two sections give fairly brief introductions to the contributions without attempting to draw any general lessons or conclusions, but it is the meat of the papers that will interest readers, and that record of experience is, for all the reasons I have indicated, variously interesting and instructive both within the USA itself and elsewhere.