The Exact Opposite of a Good Idea…
I had the great pleasure of sharing coffee this morning with a few colleagues (HB, EB, MB- I just noticed that all three have last names that begin with”B”, weird…). Beyond the simple pleasure of their company, I can honestly say that I haven’t had a conversation that stimulating in a long time.
As is typical with good conversations, it got me thinking…
I noted in the discussion that libraries were wasting a lot of money unnecessarily duplicating the collection development efforts of their fellows. In a time (and economy) when many libraries are struggling it seems to me that there needs to be a greater commitment to sharing resources and coordinating collection development efforts. Its wasteful for 20 libraries to each buy a copy of a book when the combined interest in that title for their service districts could be effectively met by 2 copies that were spread around.
Many libraries in these challenging times are trimming their budgets by trimming Interlibrary Loan service (Google search: budget cuts interlibrary loan). As far as I’m concerned, this is the exact opposite of a good idea (betcha were wondering when the title was going to come into play). Libraries should be working together to expand and streamline interlibrary loan to meet our current challenges (for that matter there should be a national library card, but I won’t go there now).Am I alone in thinking this? Certainly this has to have occurred to someone else.
Of course we all know the barriers to such a proposal. Most issues are political, and therefore asinine by default. Some issues are financial. I have little respect for these as they all really boil down to a lack of will, which is ridiculous. At one time, there were technological issues, but these are now effectively gone with recent advances in integrated library systems.
In times like these, it would seem to me that there’s no reason to not create firmer, more seamless links between libraries and numerous reasons to do so. So we need to ask ourselves why we haven’t yet and whether those reasons even make sense anymore.
