Is there a future for cooperative collection development in the digital age? - Resource Sharing in a Changing Environment

Library Trends, Wntr, 1997 by Edward Shreeves

The phrase "access over ownership" and its variants had achieved, by the early 1990s, an almost mantra-like status among librarians from all types of libraries. Its widespread currency, however, reflects more than just the rhetorical effectiveness of an oversimplified concept. Increasing pressures on the budgets of all libraries, especially research libraries, together with improved means of communication and delivery, have forced librarians to make a virtue of necessity and pay increasing attention to resource sharing as an important element in the package of services offered to users.

Most would define the "resources" of resource sharing to be the information resources typically collected by libraries and made available under certain conditions to users not traditionally a part of the owning library's clientele. Later discussion will suggest that the concept of the resources to be shared in the new electronic environment needs to be broadened to include human and computing resources, among others. In traditional terms, however, resource sharing focused largely on three functions or tasks: (1) bibliographic access--that is, knowledge of what is available for sharing from other sites through such means as union catalogs or bibliographic utilities; (2) a system for making requests and providing delivery of information, chiefly through the interlibrary loan (ILL) process, often bolstered by agreements among members of a consortium to provide expedited service to members; and (3) cooperative collection development, which sought to ensure that libraries built complementary collections of resources on which to draw. The only essential component of resource sharing is the second, a protocol for making requests and acceptable methods of delivery. Convenience and political considerations have caused most resource sharing to occur within the confines of a consortium or federation of libraries, though a consortial relationship is not absolutely necessary to cooperation at its most basic level.

Developments over the past twenty years have revolutionized libraries' ability to provide bibliographic access, even if these developments did not arise primarily to serve the needs of resource sharing. Innovations introduced over the past five or ten years are fundamentally altering the nature of interlibrary loan operations. Only in the third area, cooperative building of collections, has major change been slow to come. Yet, as many have pointed out, offering access as a stand-in for ownership works only when another library has chosen ownership over access and is willing to share the wealth (Benin, 1991, p. 82). The following paragraphs will touch briefly on some of the familiar changes in the ways bibliographic access is provided along with the changes being experienced on the delivery side of resource sharing. However, for its primary focus, this discussion will be about cooperation in the realm of collection management and development and the role of cooperative action in bringing about change in the processes of scholarly communication.

A number of significant advances based on machine-readable cataloging produced the incidental effect of dramatically improving access to bibliographic information for resource sharing. The rise in the 1970s of bibliographic utilities like OCLC and RLIN and their universal use by larger libraries provided de facto union catalogs for purposes of identifying, at the title level, materials held elsewhere. In the 1980s, many libraries began to implement integrated library systems locally, including online public access catalogs (OPACs) and acquisitions and serials subsystems. In some ways, this development represented a step backward for resource sharing, since the OPAC allowed libraries to make records for certain materials available to local users without requiring them to be made available to other libraries through national utilities. The explosion in the use of computer networks in the mid- to late-1980s compensated somewhat for this regression by enabling the persistent to search the catalogs of other libraries. The steady progress of retrospective conversion in the 1980s and 1990s also enhanced resource sharing efforts as more and more locations for older materials became findable by online searching. Finally, the increased acceptance and implementation of standards such as Z39.50 began to make it easier to search the catalogs of other libraries for all kinds of records.

Technology has also had its effect on the provision of documents via interlibrary loan. Taking advantage of every advance from the photocopy machine to the latest scanning devices, interlibrary loan departments have tried to keep up with sharply increasing demands. The 1993/94 ARL Statistics (Association of Research Libraries, 1995, pp. 8-9) shows an increase in borrowing by ARL libraries of 99 percent and an increase in lending of 50 percent in the years between 1986 and 1994. Most of those writing about resource sharing and cooperative collection development have recognized the absolute centrality of effective delivery to the success of cooperative efforts (Mosher & Pankake, 1983, p. 426; Branin, 1991, pp. 90-91). For remote access to substitute for local ownership, a library must minimize the time between identification of a needed resource and its provision. While few expect the time lag for remote resources to approach that offered by locally held materials (when those materials are on the shelf), there is general agreement that the average time of delivery must be reduced from its current average. Projects such as the North American Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery Project, sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, are seeking ways to streamline and improve the quality and speed of interlibrary lending (http:// ARL.CNI.ORG/ACCESS/NAILDD/status.html). Recent studies have also highlighted the real costs of interlibrary loan transactions and led to renewed efforts to improve efficiency and effectiveness (Roche, 1993). Wider use of faster methods of delivery have cut the time spent by "returnables" in transit, while such systems as ARIEL have helped improve the quality of transmitted images as well as allowing for delivery of scanned images to the user's desktop. All of these steps, both actual and prospective, have led to incremental improvement in the delivery component of resource sharing, but it is fair to say these improvements have not yet convinced most users that access to remote information sources is the near-equivalent to local resources. The growing utilization of commercial document suppliers has also enlarged the range of delivery options available. At the same time, they have heightened awareness of the value which users attach to rapid delivery and put added pressure on ILL units to match their speed.