College and Research Libraries DAVID C. WEBER / '1 A Century of Cooperative Programs Among Academic Libraries .~ A REVIEW OF COOPERATIVE PROGRAMS among colleges and universities over the last century leads to the conclusion that a few very significant developments and changes have taken place during the past decade after ninety years of la- borious and diverse effort toward coop- erative programs dominated by the ef- fects of national policy and economic conditions. It is an interesting history, one made difficult by the plethora of data. The present paper uses a histori- cal perspective in order to assess b~er the present and the immediate future. The first part chronologically prese~ts selected examples of cooperative pro- grams. The latter section includes de- tails on a few programs of current spe- cial significance, comments on some strengths and weaknesses, and reaches 111 . a few conclusions. EARLY HISTORICAL REVIEW Before reviewing the past century, it ...., may be worthwhile taking a brief look at circumstances in academic libraries >1 two hundred years ago. At that time academic libraries in America were in- deed insignificant by today's perspective. Dartmouth had 305 volumes. Brown University owned 312 volumes including 't fifty-two received in 1772 which were "by far the greatest donation our little ~ library has yet had." Princeton had more than 1,200 volumes, all to be con- sumed by fire in 1801. The University of Pennsy~vania' s chief distinction in 1776 was that during the Revolution it had received a gift of scientific books from Louis XVI. Columbia stor~d its volumes during the war in the city hall or elsewhere; British soldiers took them to barter for grog, and only six or seven hundred volumes were found-thirty years later-in St. Paul's Chapel. By the time of the Revolution, Yale had col- lected over 4,000 volumes in its library. The College of William and Mary had a very few thousand volumes. Harvard had lost all but 404 volumes of its li- brary by fire in 1764, yet by the Revo- lutionary War it had been rebuilt prob- ably to nearly 10,000 volumes. By 1876 the circumstances were mark- edly different. Great libraries had come upon the American scene. Some remark- able librarians had created most of the essential concepts and policies for li- brary administrative methods. Collec- tions began to grow rapidly, with a great deal of attention necessarily given to cataloging and classification. The year 1876 was momentous in that the Ameri- can Library Association was formed. 1 The American Library ] ournal was founded with four of its twenty-one as- sociate editors "leading the profession" from university libraries. The Library Bureau was established as a supply house providing a major force toward I 205 206 1 College & Research Libraries • May 1976 standardization. It also was the year in which the classic -volume, Public Li- braries in the United States of America; Their History, Condition and Manage- ment, was published by the United States Bureau of Education. One looks in vain, however, in that major volume of 1,187 pages for any statement re- garding cooperation among academic li- braries. Cooperative cataloging was one of the very first interests of the new library as- sociation. A committee was formed to devise a plan for continuation of Poole's "Index to Periodical Literature," and another committee tackled the mat- ter of standardization of cataloging. Several articles in the Library I ournal discussed plans for cooperation in in- dexing and cataloging. Yet it was a Committe·e on Cooperation in Indexing and Cataloguing College Libraries, which was appointed August 1876, that is significant with respect to academic cooperation. It was formed by the li- brarians of the University of Rochester, Cornell University, Vassar College, Syra- cuse University, and the New York State Library. This committee presented to the University Convocation of the State of New York in July 1877 a substantial report which called upon college li- braries to speak out on any special adaptation of the cooperative catalog- ing movement which was required for their special wants: At present the work is chiefly in the hands of the public libraries. . . . In making this report your committee do not wish to be understood as endorsing fully all the methods proposed by the committees of the Library Association. It is very doubtful whether as good cataloging can be done, in the manner proposed, by a considerable number of libraries, even under very explicit rules, as might be expected of one or two experts, who should work for pay under the general direction and criti- cism of the committee. Cooperation can be secured quite as effectively by a combination of capital as by a com- bination of labor. In.such an enterprise the first most important thing to be aimed at is perfection of work. . . . Other points might be mentioned but a review of the methods proposed is not the object of this report. We be- lieve that it will be far better for us to work with the Library Association, though we may differ in opinion as to some details, than to undertake any separate work in this state.2 The decade of the 1890s witnessed the beginnings of major national pro- grams of academic library cooperation. It did not come unannounced onto the scene. There had indeed been discus- sions over several previous decades, at least since 1851, and no doubt there may have been a large number of local ar- rangements of such cooperation. In 1898 the librarian of the University of California announced willingness to lend to other libraries that would lend to the University of California. In January 1898 the American Li- brary Association began publishing analytic cards as a shared indexing/ cata- loging program. The copy for these cards was prepared by five major li- braries for articles in some 250 serials. The H. W. Wilson Company took over this analytic activity in June 1919 for incorporation into the International In- dex of Periodicals. INTO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY In another consideration, the librari- an of Princeton University, Ernest C. Richardson, proposed in the spring of 1899 "a lending library for libraries" and suggested that this might be the Li- brary of Congress or an independent organization. The Library of Congress issued a pol- icy governing interlibrary loans in 1907 and lent to such an extent that by 1909 it loaned. 1,023 volumes to 119 libraries -including forty-nine academic li- braries which accounted for half of these loans. An ALA interlibrary loan • + • A Century of Cooperative Programs I 207 code was first published in 1916. If a union catalog of holdings is per- mitted within the definition of coopera- tion, there were then major develop- ments, notably so in the first decade of this century. The first regional union catalog was created in 1901 at the Cali- fornia State Library. After first being limited to periodicals, it was soon en- larged to cover all nonfiction. The Na- tional Union Catalog was established in 1900. In November 1901 the Library of Congress began selling copies of its printed catalog cards as well as galley proofs of these cards. During the win- ter of 1901-02 it began the donation of complete "depository" sets of cards to certain libraries. Some libraries receiv- ,.; ing these began immediately to file them t 1 into their public card catalogs, thus con- stituting union catalogs. The University of Chicago Library from 1913 and the Harvard College Library from 1911 published printed cards, the scope de- signed to supplement LC and comple- ment each other. Chicago distributed its cards from 1913 until1917. (When Chi- cago began distributing its cards May 2, 1913, those titles also owned by Har- vard, about 30 percent, appeared with the symbol "UCL-HCL.") The Univer- sity of California issued them from 1915 to 1917. In July 1918 the Universi- ty of Chicago began publishing analytic cards for certain European serials. The University of Michigan published for some time after 1924; the University of Illinois started in 1926. Wesleyan Uni- versity published cards sold to thirty- two research libraries from 1934 until World War II. The Library of Con- gress established its Cooperative Cata- loging Division in 1932.3 Another cooperative endeavor is that of joint acquisition programs. Perhaps the earliest example is the 1913-14 South American buying trip to eleven countries by Walter Lichtenstein, the Librarian of Northwestern University. He acquired 9,000 volumes plus news- papers and a few manuscripts on be- half of Harvard University, Brown University, Northwestern University, the John Crerar Library, and the Ameri- can Antiquarian Society. One or two features of this joint effort are of note: In Venezuela and Bolivia and partly also in Brazil the purchases consisted of collections which had to be divided among the cooperating institutions, and naturally included a fair amount of material which, either because the cooperating institutions already had it or because the class of material in question is not collected by the institu- tions which I represented, can be sold to other libraries in this country. The purchase of collections on joint ac- count in this manner was a new ex- periment. It did not seem to me to be wholly satisfactory. The chief difficulty was that the material could not be readily divided until my own return to this country, with the result that no one knew until I did return how much each institution was liable, and hence I was considerably hampered in mak- ing further purchases. As it finally turned out, one institution acted to a large extent as banker for the other in- stitutions, which evidently is pleasant enough for the latter, but is not quite fair to that institution which has the misfortune to be the banker .... When the collections came to be divided it was soon felt that the only possible way to divide the cost among the in- stitutions interested was to devise a system of points. A pamphlet was counted as one point, an unbound vol- ume as four, and a bound volume as eight.4 It seems quite certain that the in- crease in publishing in the 1850s and the economics surrounding the Civil War brought an end to the common practice of publishing library catalogs periodically in book . form. It also there- . by hastened the adoption of unitary catalog cards which during the last quarter of the nineteenth century be- came the prevalent mode for listing 208 I College & Research Libraries • May 1976 holdings and facilitated sharing of bib- liographic data. If the more affluent times of the 1880s and 1890s resulted in phenomenal growth of collections, it may have been predictable there would be an upsurge in cooperative proposals and the beginning of national coopera- tive programs. Despite the 1927 publication of the great Union List of Serials in Libraries of the United States and Canada, it would seem that the decade of the 1920s was not a period of new concepts in academic library cooperation. With the crash of 1929 and conditions of the Great Depression, however, there was impetus for cooperation which led to new programs of which a few among academic libraries may be cited. Dozens of new union card catalogs were begun in the 1930s, stimulated by the vast federal relief program. One re- sult was the 1940-41 survey under the sponsorship of the ALA Board of Re- sources of American Libraries which recommended their future coordination to assure thorough coverage, minimum overlap, and sound fiscal support. As a predecessor to cataloging-in-pub- lication and the National Program for Acquisitions and Cataloging (NPAC), the Cooperative Cataloging Program be- gan in 1932. Within ten years nearly 400 U.S. and Canadian libraries contributed data for 60,000 scholarly titles for LC editing and publication. An informal arrangement among sev- eral institutions constituted the Coop- erating Libraries of Upper New York, CLUNY. Formed in 1931, it included Buffalo University, Colgate University, the Grosvenor Library, Hamilton Col- lege, Syracuse University, Cornell Uni- versity, and Union College. This group functioned until 1939 as a clearing- house for mutual problems and coop- erated on a union list of periodicals and the joint purchase of microfilm of early English publications. An example of a formal agreement is the Duke University and the Univer- sity of North Carolina interlibrary proj- ect. In 1931 these two institutions agreed to ~pedal book collecting areas, and the libraries exchanged author cards for their catalogs. Four years later a mes- senger service commenced. Two other ;North Carolina institutions joined in 1955, and full borrowing privileges were extended to all members of each institution. An example of contractual arrange- ments among several libraries is the Joint University Libraries founded in 1936 by Vanderbilt University, George Peabody College, and Scarritt College for Christian Workers. Operating un- der a joint board of trustees, the facili- ty is an independent entity, jointly owned and financed by the partici- pants. 5 Ano.ther example is The Clare- mont Colleges library system which be- gan in 1931 when a contractual arrange- ment among the Claremont Graduate School, Pomona College, and Scripps College established a joint order and catalog department to serve the three li- braries. A 1933 example of an arrangement for reciprocal borrowing privileges is the Atlanta University Center Corpora- tion in Atlanta, Georgia. With an initi- ating grant from the General Educa- tion Board it included Atlanta Univer- sity, Morehouse College, Spelman Col- lege, Morris Brown College, Clark University, and in 1957 the Interdenom- inational Theological Center. · Another variation of interinstitution- al cooperation is the unification of aca- demic libraries under state control. This was pioneered in 1932 by the Oregon State Board ·of Higher Education which appointed one director of libraries for the entire state system and established the principle of free circulation among all state institutions. It also set up a central order diVision which now takes the form of a combined author list of all books and periodicals in the state .. ,. + A Century of Cooperative Programs f 209 system maintained in the Order Depart- ment of the Oregon State University Li- brary "to eliminate unnecessary duplica- tion of materials."6 MORE RECENT EVENTS A highly selective list of other coop- erative programs of the past forty years would include the following: 1942-0pening of the New England Deposit Library ( NEDL) as a cooperative storage facility of Boston College, Boston Uni- versity, Harvard University, M.I.T., Radcliffe College, Sim- mons College, Tufts Univer- sity, and four nonacademic li- braries. 1944-The Cooperative Committee on Library Building Plans ini- tiated by President Dodds of Princeton to concern itself with common problems in the planning for and design of academic library buildings. 1946-The Cooperative Acquisitions Project for Wartime Publica- tions conducted by the Library of Congress which, over three years, shipped nearly a mil- lion volumes from Europe to 113 participating American li- braries. 1948-Formation of the Universal Serial and Book Exchange, Inc. (previously named the U.S. Book Exchange). Of the ini- tial members, 106 ( 76 percent) were college or university li- braries; they continue to de- posit about 70 percent of the material exchanged, and they receive about the same percent- age of 'the total distributed. 1948-Start of servic.e under the Farmington Plan to about sixty research libraries of a coordi- nated foreign acquisition pro- gram for current mateJCials of research value-a cooperative program born of disconcerting experiences with European ac- quisitions during and immedi- ately following World War II. This major cooperative pro- gram was one of the most ef- fective and • significant over many years. With 1965 as an example, fifty-two libraries ac- quired 22,419 volumes, consti- tuting the total research publi- cations from fourteen coun- tries, in addition to area assign- ment receipts from the less- developed countries. 1951-0pening of the Midwest Inter- Library Center, later to be known as the Center for Re- search Libraries, by ten mid- western university libraries as a cooperative akin to the NEDL but with a program for joint buying and different cate- gories of deposit or center ownership. 1956-Initiation of the Foreign News- paper Microfilm Project a_s a cooperatively filmed, shared- positive-copy program managed by the Association of Research Libraries, the offspring of Har- vard's duplicate sale program begun in 1938. 1959-The Latin American Coop- erative Acquisitions Program (LA CAP), begun as a com- mercial endeavor for about forty academic libraries. 7 1961-Congress authorized · expendi- tures under Public Law 480 of blocked currencies for acquisi- tion and cataloging of multi- ple copies of publications from eight countries. Managed by the Library of Congress, this PL 480 program benefited over 300 academic libraries, with materials from Ceylon, India, Indonesia, Israel; Nepal, Pakistan, United Arab Repub- 210 I College & Research Libraries • May 1976 lie, and Yugoslavia. 1965-The Medical Library Assist- ance Act, creating, among oth- er programs, the eleven Re- gional Medical Libraries pro- viding interlibrary loan and reference and consultation ser- vices to a broad region. Seven are located in universities: Harvard, University of Wash- ington, Wayne State, UCLA, Emory, Texas, and Nebraska. 1966-The National Program for Acquisitions and Cataloging (NPAC), managed by the Li- brary of Congress and initiated by the Association of Research Libraries. 1966-The New York State Refer- ence and Research Library Re- sources Program ( 3Rs Pro- gram) established to .facilitate use of research library materi- als. 1967 -Incorporation of the Ohio Col- lege Library Center ( OCLC) as a cooperative cataloging ser- vice for Ohio colleges and uni- versities. 1968-The Center for Chinese Re- search Materials, formed by the Association of Research Li- braries for acquiring, reprint- ing, and distributing selected valuable but inaccessible Chi- nese scholarly materials. 1973-The Research Libraries Group, formed of Harvard Universi- ty, Yale University, Columbia University, and the New York Public Library, to undertake a program of coordinated collec- tion building, reciprocal access privileges, delivery service, and a common computer storage of catalog records for their col- lections so as to enhance coor- dinated acquisitions and re- source sharing. The composition of prograins for four cooperatives begun in the late 1960s may be cited as typical. The Five Associated University Libraries (FAUL) in New York (Buffalo, Rochester, Syra- cuse, Cornell, and Binghamton) cur- rently includes assigned subject special- ization for acquisitions, delivery service, photocopying, reciprocal borrowing, ex- panded interlibrary loan service, and joint research projects. ·The Librarians of the Council of Independent Ken- tucky Colleges and Universities encom- passes twenty-one colleges active in joint purchase, assigned subject specialization, reciprocal borrowing privileges, expand- ed interlibrary loan service, and produc- tion of union lists and directories. The Middle Atlantic Research Libraries In- formation Network (MARLIN) of sev- en universities includes delivery ser- vices, photocopying, mutual notification of purchase, production of union lists and directories, expanded interlibrary loan, and special communication ser- vices. The North Dakota Network for Knowledge of seventeen college and university libraries plus thirteen public and special libraries includes all of MARLIN's program except purchase notification and also provides mutual reference services, reciprocal borrow- ing, and operation of a special biblio- graphic center. One or two cooperative liaisons were ·formed every year or so from 1930 until 1960 when there was a sharp increase. The Delanoy-Cuadra directory lists the births: four in 1964;· seven in 1965; eleven in 1966; sixteen in 1967; twenty- four in 1968; twenty-four in 1969; and at least nineteen in 1970.8 If one had a comparable mortality list, one might speculate that some of these would fal- ter. Yet a spot check found none of those listed as formed during the 1960s were deceased by 1975. SHORT-LIVED EFFORTS ALSO PROVIDE LESSONS Yet it must also be recorded that some • • + A Century of Cooperative Programs I 211 major attempts at cooperation among academic libraries petered out or failed, though much may have been learned. An evaluative history of library cooper- ation is faced with problems. Joe W. Kraus has written: Several difficulties present themselves at the outset. The literature of library · cooperation is very large and most of the articles are uncritical. Although most of the cooperative enterprises of libraries are announced and described in some detail in library periodicals, there are few evaluative reports that give a clear account of the success of a venture and the factors leading to success or failure. Unsuccessful ones, in fact, simply seem to fade away. Costs of a cooperative effort are par- ticularly hard to ascertain, in part be- cause many expenses are absorbed in the participating libraries, and in part because standard reporting procedures have generally not yet been devel- oped.9 One may here cite the Columbia-Har- vard-Yale medical library computer- based cooperative c·ataloging program that was terminated after operating from 1963 to 1966. As stated in the re- search proposal issued in December 1962 from the Yale Medical Library, the objective of the project was to test the feasibility of using a computerized catalog to provide rapid and improved information services in medical li- braries. An on-line system was projected; the significant achievements were the re- cording of 23,000 titles and the auto- mated production of catalog cards. (It was the precursor of OCLC.) An array of technical problems concerned input procedures. A change in data format standards was needed. Authority files were lacking. The subject treatment caused great problems, as did error-de- tection procedures. There were prob- lems of staff cooperation. and communi- cation.10 Operational methods among the three participants varie