Is There a Future for Cooperative Collection Development in the Digital Age?

Of the three major components of resource sharing, cooperative collection development, in contrast to bibliographic access and interlibrary lending, has thus far experienced less extensive transformation as a result of new technologies. There is widespread agreement about the factors that should lead to success in cooperative collection building projects, but there is also a general sense that such projects have not lived up to their promise. The changes being experienced during the present transition to a largely digital environment offer new opportunities for cooperative collection development efforts but also call into question the value of investing in models based on a predominantly print environment. Collection development librarians may find that, in the future, their expertise may be the most important resource they have to share rather than the collections they are building.