Is Cooperation Cost-Effective? A Study of Latin American Collections and Resource Sharing

By: Dr. Jennifer Cobb
Supervising: Dr. Sanford Berg
Date: December 12, 1996

I. Introduction

Do libraries receive beneficial cost savings from cooperative agreements to specialize their
acquisition of foreign publications? The instinctive response to this question would support
specialization: cooperation would eliminate unnecessary duplication of resources, allowing
libraries to redirect funds towards the needs of their local consumers. However, the past
breakdown of cooperative collection development plans and current concerns that acquisition
efforts have not kept up with the growth in foreign publication suggest that the cooperative
efforts may be difficult to achieve. The purpose of this project is to examine the benefits and
costs of cooperative collection development in contrast to alternatives such as the "stand alone"
library. By analyzing both the explicit and implicit costs and benefits to cooperation, we hope to
construct possible mechanisms by which cooperative collection development can be managed
and maintained for the benefit of all member libraries.

II. Cooperation versus the "Stand Alone" Library

To correctly evaluate the cost savings that we believe will arise from cooperative collection
development, we need to define the alternative outcome of non-cooperation. We will call this
non-cooperative result the "stand alone" library. The stand alone library does not collect
cooperatively with other libraries; its acquisition efforts are completely derived from its local
constituents' demands for library services. To a certain extent, libraries contain a "stand alone",
or nontraded, component: those high usage, short waiting time items which would be very costly
to borrow when compared to their cost of acquisition and management. As a result, all libraries
will have some duplication of resources, mainly at the instructional level, but will also want to
borrow materials whose usage level is so low that acquisition is not cost-effective.

An obvious problem with the stand alone position is that the libraries will not have access to very
specialized foreign language material that is useful for research purposes. Individual libraries
cannot acquire all titles published; they are subject to a budget constraint, so materials that have
immediate high-demand characteristics will receive preference in acquisition. Hence library
users will be forced to bear the costs of acquiring that information not collected by their local
 library. These costs may involve a researcher traveling to another library to obtain the needed
 information, or possibly to the country of publication. The cost of non-acquisition might also
 include research foregone, as the lack of information encourages shifts toward research utilizing
 more available materials. Libraries do not observe this cost of acquiring information, since it is
 not something they are paying for explicitly. However, someone in the university community
 does end up "paying" for a more homogeneous collection. These opportunity costs must be
 accounted for and incorporated into analysis along with the more obvious costs of acquisition
 and management.