Reply to these posts on whether you agree or disagree with their thoughts. Add some meaningful thoughts to these responses. There is no need to cite. I will add notes, lectures, and chapters to help with the reply.
Post 1
The advantage of cooperative collection development/collaboration/resource sharing is that one library does not have to purchase all the resources. Participating in a consortium expands the collection immensely and allows the library itself to fulfill the needs of the patrons and help grow collections for all participating collection collaborators. The advantage that I focused on was being able to reduce the duplication of expensive materials. Ideally, all libraries should be able to provide locally all items in heavy demand by their particular users (Gregory 2019). One advantage of participating in a consortium is that each entity can collect a theme based on the collection that they are developing. A consortium in Massachusetts is tackling select aspects of literature, film, and political science, divvying up collection responsibilities for the first two by publisher and the latter by subject (Hoffert 2006). This is an effort that will gradually grow the selection between the libraries and allow the libraries with limited collections the opportunity to have more resources for their patrons. Technology has really played a positive role in the ability to share databases and journals that are often costly. These days, no library can hope to own everything, and collaborative collection development allows for a richer, more diverse collection while saving space and money (Hoffert 2006).
References:
Gregory, Vicki L. 2019. Collection Development and Management for 21st Century Library Collections : An Introduction. Chicago: Ala Neal-Schuman.
Hoffert, Barbara. 2006. “The United Way.” Library Journal 131, no. 8: 38-41.
Post 2
The textbook briefly mentions the issue on pages 123-124 about the implications that one library might be contributing more than the other and this can cause disagreements or frustrations. I would think that this is a big problem that is difficult to address because every library has their own goals, funding, and abilities. How do a variety of libraries come together to contribute and share resources equally without running into this particular problem? Maybe the best way to resolve this issue is to have an agreed upon minimum of what all libraries involved can contribute. Any library wanting to contribute more than the minimum agreement can be up to their digression. Every year as the annual budget changes, the libraries can either negotiate the minimum contribution or any libraries unable to meet the minimum roll-off the resource sharing for that year. However, as libraries offer so many different materials, it might take a long discussion to determine what a minimum looks like. This should be a good method to overcome this concern to make collaboration more successful, but it requires a lot of time from library department heads to sit down and discuss the contract of specifics. Overall, I think it would benefit all libraries involved and is worth the time, but I am interested to see how everyone else might have a solution to this issue.
References:
Gregory, V. L. (2019). Collection development and management for 21st century library collections : An introduction. Chicago: Ala Neal-Schuman.