When the Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Development of Cooperative Service and Resource Sharing in Libraries: 1876–2002

SUMMARY

This article will look at the historical development of cooperative service and resource sharing in libraries. Interlibrary Loan, union catalogs, library consortia, and electronic reference, have all impacted library work in the past century. The dissolving of walls is one of the main themes of library history in the 20th century. The developments of these years has clearly put the ability to use both human and institutional resources at the heart of contemporary library service. In looking at how this came to be, this article will examine developments in societal infrastructure and technology that made cooperative schemes both possible and economical. This article will also discuss how these developments have forced libraries to consider cooperative ways to respond to their primary service function. Lastly, conclusions will be drawn about how the emerging cooperative environment is changing the educational role of the librarian.     

The Contemporary Academic Library Resource Sharing Mission: Fragmentation or Evolution?

Academic interlibrary loan practitioners are experiencing changes that can be characterized as either the fragmentation of the resource sharing mission or its evolution into a new form of service routinely making use of new and diverse sources of information outside the scope of past practices. Among these new sources are curated repositories of open access literature, institutional repositories, digital libraries containing scanned public domain literature, and social media article-sharing networking sites. The incorporation of these sources of information into regular workflows presents interlibrary loan practitioners with many challenges. This paper will discuss ways to address these developments.     

Resource Sharing and Social Justice: An MLIS Student Intern’s Perspective of the 2018 Great Lakes Resource Sharing Conference

This paper presents a library student intern’s experience at the Great Lakes Resource Sharing Conference 2018 (GLRSC) in Perrysburg, Ohio on June 7–8. GLRSC is a regional conference aimed at training resource sharing (RS) professionals and creating a collaborative environment for peers to discuss new ideas, best practices, and partnership opportunities, among other related topics. This paper focuses on GLRSC 2018 presenters who emphasized the inherent value of librarianship, and RS specifically, as a tool for social justice. George Needham’s discussion of the intense and unique value of RS to shape our community’s information access is presented, as well as Anna Bendo and Stephen Kaufman’s session about affordable learning options for students of higher education. The inherent relationship between RS and intellectual freedom is also discussed. These concepts of unconditional information access resonate with Myers due to her interest in outreach librarianship and commitment to her position serving marginalized patrons in her community who have severely limited access to the public library’s resources and materials.     

The Future of Libraries: More Questions Than Answers?

This article summarizes the conclusions from a series of two-day seminars of professional library executives on the future of libraries. The provocative element in this summary is the groups’ promises to not get caught up in library “nostalgia, platitudes, and clichés.” The result is a clear-cut set of questions that all librarians but especially public librarians need to face as they prepare for the many questions of adaptation of their profession to the issues they already face in keeping or making their libraries successful through the remaining decades of the 21st century.     

Libraries and value propositions: Worth the investment?

What is a library worth? This question has implications for all libraries and the clientele they serve, especially in times of economic uncertainty when libraries often have to justify their existence and demonstrate their worth. One method of assessing this worth is through value propositions, which have been primarily associated with the business sector, wherein an exploratory process is used to discover what customers need from an organization. This article will show how libraries can utilize value proposition strategies to think differently about how their resources and services create value for their respective patron segments. This renewed perspective may encourage librarians to reimagine their purpose, reorganize their focus, and redefine their worth.     

The “Looking Into the Past” Photographs: Comparing and Sharing the Past

With contemporary mediated nostalgia on the rise, it is increasingly important to identify sites of past remembrance that provide potentials for a comparative and healthy engagement with our collective and individual histories. Refracted through scholarly discourse about nostalgia, this analysis focuses on one example of potentially healthy past engagement called the “Looking Into the Past” photographs – where a photographer maps a comparatively vintage image onto a contemporary picture of the exact same locale to physically and visually compare the past to the present. A deep reading of the images' textual properties elucidates how this past engagement meme encourages a healthy use of comparative histories as opposed to mainstream media texts that tend to discourage healthy historical comparison.     

Academic Libraries: “Social” or “Communal?” The Nature and Future of Academic Libraries

The apparent death of academic libraries, as measured by declining circulation of print materials, reduced use of reference services, and falling gate counts, has led to calls for a more “social” approach to academic libraries: installing cafés, expanding group study spaces, and developing “information commons.” This study compares these social models with the traditional academic library, whose spirit is best understood as “communal.” It argues that this communal spirit is unique and greatly valued by academic library users. Efforts to create a more social academic library threaten this communal spirit and may do more harm than good.     

A Library for Libraries: Is the Joint Library Facility becoming an Interlibrary Loan Hub for Libraries?

ABSTRACT

What happens when libraries begin to use ILL to request items that they already own in their home collection? The goal of this multiyear study involving 9565 ILL requests to the Joint Library Facility in Bryan, Texas, is to examine whether or not the shared storage facility was becoming an ILL hub for some libraries. This paper reports the results of the study and how individual requesting and lending interlibrary loan policies and procedures might be altered to address these developing issues.     

“Ebooks for the Classroom+” at University of South Florida Libraries: A Case Study of Database Management

The University of South Florida Libraries has supported a campus-wide “Textbook Affordability Project” initiative by creating and maintaining an ebooks database called “Ebooks for the Classroom+.” This database facilitates faculty members’ adoption of ebooks as textbooks through library acquisitions in the hope that students can achieve academic success without paying for expensive textbooks. It is built and run by the library, using data based on vendor-supplied information. This paper discusses the approaches, the challenges, and the future plans for building and updating the database.     

Libraries and museums in the flat world: Are they becoming virtual destinations?

In his recent book, “The World is Flat”, Thomas L. Friedman reviews the impact of networks on globalization. The emergence of the Internet, web browsers, computer applications talking to each other through the Internet, and the open source software, among others, made the world flatter and created an opportunity for individuals to collaborate and compete globally. Friedman predicts that “connecting all the knowledge centers on the planet together into a single global network… could usher in an amazing era of prosperity and innovation”. Networking also is changing the ways by which libraries and museums provide access to information sources and services. In the flat world, libraries and museums are no longer a physical “place” only: they are becoming “virtual destinations”. This paper discusses the implications of this transformation for the digitization and preservation of, and access to, cultural heritage resources.     

A Resource That Inspires: Exploring the “Include” Foundation of the National School Library Standards for Learners,School Librarians,and School Libraries

The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) has offered a multi-layered approach to serving our schools with the National School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries. The AASL Standards provide a valuable resource for professional development and a touchstone to inspire us to consider anew the basic elements of our profession. In this first column, one of the six Shared Foundations, “Include”, provides a way to consider several issues important to school libraries.     

The “Big Deal”: A Survey of How Libraries Are Responding and What the Alternatives Are

The library's mission is to support the information and educational needs of its users. E-journal “Big Deals” offer libraries one method of maximizing the resources available to their users, but, with libraries now experiencing flat or decreasing budgets, these Big Deals present budgetary difficulties for libraries. They also remove collection development decisions from the control of the libraries themselves. Some libraries have canceled their Big Deals, resulting in problems. This article presents the results of an online survey of libraries regarding these bundled journal packages.     

The Razor's Edge: Louisiana's State Budget and the Serials Crisis of 2010–2012

Offered as a piquant contrast to strategy sessions that presume a surfeit of resources, this presentation focuses on coping with massive budget cuts to higher education and libraries in one of the poorest states in the union. Sara Zimmerman focused on the response to the funding emergency and the long-range strategies involved in gaining financial and political support to weather the coming storm of 2011. Karen Niemla played a critical role in publicizing the LOUIS emergency and discussed how Web 2.0 tools provided an economical and effective means of communicating the value of libraries. Michael Matthews discussed the long-term effects of shrinking academic journal collections and how academic libraries are adjusting their collection development policies to cope with the prospect of vanishing resources.     

The Poor Man's Lamb Revisited? Assessing the State of LPFM at its 10th Anniversary

In this article the authors report the results of a year-long investigation into the state of the low-power FM (LPFM) industry on its 10th anniversary. They question whether LPFM stations give voice to the previously voiceless as envisioned or, as some research has indicated, benefit religious communities' efforts to expand their cultural reach. Using a 2-phase study, the authors first mapped the LPFM industry using Federal Communications Commission data and public information provided by LPFM stations and their owners and operators over the Internet. The authors then conducted interviews with dozens of LPFM operators across the United States. Results indicate that large interests, in particular religious organizations, have created de facto networks that rely on outside entities for the majority of programming, thus circumventing the spirit of the original policy.     

The h-index: A case of the tail wagging the dog?

From the way that it was initially defined (Hirsch, 2005), the h-index naturally encourages focus on the most highly cited publications of an author and this in turn has led to (predominantly) a rank-based approach to its investigation. However, Hirsch (2005) and Burrell (2007a) both adopted a frequency-based approach leading to general conjectures regarding the relationship between the h-index and the author's publication and citation rates as well as his/her career length. Here we apply the distributional results of Burrell, 2007a, Burrell, 2013b to three published data sets to show that a good estimate of the h-index can often be obtained knowing only the number of publications and the number of citations. (Exceptions can occur when an author has one or more “outliers” in the upper tail of the citation distribution.) In other words, maybe the main body of the distribution determines the h-index, not the wild wagging of the tail. Furthermore, the simple geometric distribution turns out to be the key.