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

Library Trends, Summer, 1995 by Jan Ison

Make Collections Accessible to Other Participating Members

Another role that the rural library needs to play is to offer to share the resources that it has. While most rural libraries are more than willing to share, they often have not had that opportunity. A library cannot easily share if what it owns is not available on an electronic database. This means that the library will need to participate and probably spend some precious local funds to have collections made available in shared databases at the regional, state, and national level. This will further mean that the library will have to follow national standards in order to be able to effectively share resources.

Rural public libraries often have an image problem within the local community, within the library and the board of the library, within the cooperative, and throughout the library community. That image problem is the commonly held belief that small libraries, and especially rural libraries, have little if anything of value to share with other libraries. Some believe large libraries have the unique items to share and that small or rural libraries have only duplicates. According to Atkinson (1987), there are unique items in almost every type and size of library; there just are fewer unique items in small libraries (p. 437). However, that does not make the resources of any less value. It is clear that, when the small and rural library is a member of a cooperative organization with a means to offer resources to the other partners, it has provided, and does provide, a major contribution to resource sharing in the network.

The image problem further seems to be that residents in rural communities do not realize the wealth of resources and access to resources that are available in the community. The rural residents often think that they will find everything that they want in larger, more metropolitan, libraries. The fact is that resources are often easier to obtain in a rural library. Customer service is more personalized and the local demand for newer material is usually lower.

Honor Membership Responsibilities and Commitments

The most important thing that any member of a cooperative can do is honor responsibilities and commitments. This means to support all the roles previously described and to meet any agreed upon policies of the cooperative organization. For example, if the policy of the cooperative is to offer reciprocal borrowing among libraries in the network, and policy requires that library cards be validated every year, then the rural library must comply with that agreement. While it may seem like an undesirable step in a rural area where one knows all the borrowers, it is essential in a larger library where the staff simply does not know everyone. Compliance to agreed upon responsibilities make the entire process of interlibrary cooperation work effectively for everyone.

It is also important for the rural library to expect that other libraries in the network will honor their membership responsibilities. Frequently, personnel in rural libraries overlook noncompliance with policies by larger libraries. The reason sometimes relates to fear that the larger library simply will not participate in the network at all if they have to follow the policies, and the rural library may believe that the larger library does not need the network as much as they need it.