Cooperative Collection Development Equals Collaborative Interdependence

Resource sharing or cooperative collection development among American libraries is not new; history reveals waves of cooperative spirit over many decades. Librarians in the United States—at least since librarianship became a serious professional enterprise around the turn of the century—have exhibited a democratic altruism about information and its distribution that has resulted in the world's richest and most extensive library collections and a tradition of library service unmatched anywhere else on the globe. Cooperative collection development in one guise or another has long been a part of both that spirit and that enterprise.