Reports the methodology and results of a study which explored the potential of three approaches to sampling the Australian Bibliographic Network (ABN) database files for determining collection overlap among Australian libraries. (Author/CLB)

Librarians' work has become more challenging and complex over the past 15 years. Fifteen years ago, the telephone was a librarian's most used and most effective instrument, and librarians mostly relied on the resources within their own walls. In that era, resource sharing placed substantial burdens on larger libraries, and the resources of smaller…

Discusses the goals of library networks in terms of sharing scarce resources and improving user access to information, and advocates cooperative library planning to enhance these goals, including interlibrary activities and multitype library systems. (CLB)

The continuing problem of the high cost of accessing scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature haunts both developed and developing economies. Maintaining access to significant research and scholarship at a time when both the volume and price of information have increased nearly three-fold in the last decade requires fresh strategies and…

The Association of Research Libraries' Office of Management Services (OMS), working with the Research Libraries Group, Inc. (RLG), began the North American Collections Inventory Project (NCIP) in July 1983 as a cooperative effort intended eventually to involve research libraries throughout the United States and Canada. The project's long-term goal…

Describes the role, users, collections and services of the National Agricultural Library. Some of the services discussed include a machine readable bibliographic database, an international interlibrary loan system, programs to develop library networks and cooperative cataloging, and the development and use of information technologies such as laser…

Provides a case study from the 1930s to the present of cooperative collection development at the Research Triangle university libraries (North Carolina). The rationale and principles for successful cooperation, types of cooperation that work best for different subjects and kinds of materials, and factors that promote long-term cooperation are…

A distributed union catalog is a network of bibliographic systems that cooperate to enable their users to discover sites that hold copies of known items. Some participating systems will be traditional union catalogs, others will be single sites with comprehensive collections, and others will be local or regional resource sharing systems. A…

The virtual Canadian union catalog (vCuc) project is a project among Canadian libraries to use Z39.50 (an information protocol standard) for searching distributed individual library catalogs and union catalogs. This paper summarizes the major technical, vendor, bibliographic data, and administrative issues that must be resolved before the…

This plan describes the status of multi-library cooperation and resource sharing in Idaho and outlines possible ways of developing an infrastructure which supports those activities. The end result will be regional multi-type library organizations with well-developed governance structures which support resource sharing activities locally,…

This book shows librarians the strengths and weaknesses of electronic resources and the implications these resources have on collection management. It helps librarians incorporate electronic resources into their collections. The book examines the history of electronic resources in document collections and analyzes the gains and losses libraries…