Rural public libraries in multitype library cooperatives - Rural Libraries and Information Services

Promotion and Advocacy

While promotion and advocacy is not a role that is identified specifically in most state laws or rules and regulations, it is a major role that cooperatives have supported for years. This role is often based on the communication network that exists within the organization of member libraries. Since the network already has a means of communicating with member libraries, it is able to share library information updates with members in a more timely manner than other agencies. This will also change as technology provides a more efficient means of communication than the traditional paper communications tools of newsletters, updates, memos, or fax transmissions.

Promoting libraries in general and advocating for library service is something that cooperatives can also do efficiently. While citizens in local rural areas want to know what information the local library has and the local library is in the best position to provide that information, the cooperative is in a good position to support and provide information to funding agencies on a variety of libraries and a variety of library services and information.

Facilitating and Coordinating Cooperative Programs

A major role for cooperatives is to encourage and promote local cooperation. There is very little in the literature about cooperation in rural areas among local library institutions and other local agencies. While it would seem logical that the school and public libraries would have very extensive sharing models in rural areas, the cooperation often is more informal rather than a planned and constantly reviewed process. Although the majority of rural libraries are not partners with local agencies, such as the Cooperative Extension Service, such a partnership would greatly enhance information delivery.

One frequently associates cooperation at the local level with combined school and public libraries. While that is a way to more efficiently utilize a community's library resources in rural areas, it opens the issue of why there are not more formal cooperative efforts between libraries and other information providers within the same community.

The role of the cooperative in this instance is to encourage, to consult, and to provide opportunities for local libraries to work together in addition to offering a means for enhanced local sharing of resources.

Equalization of Service

Another reason for early cooperative efforts was to encourage the equalization of service. The HBW Report (HBW Associates, 1986) on Illinois library systems addresses the issue of equalizing service and concludes that service could not be equalized as the needs of each individual library were quite different even among similar rural libraries. The citizens want and demand different services from their local library. Equalization of service should not be a goal. What systems could and should do is to equalize the access to resources as the California planning model discussed. It was the equalization of access to the resources, not the equalization of service, that was identified as the goal (pp. 26-34).