less than the cost of borrowing, the library should acquire these items. This leads to the ultimate
question: how high do the costs of non-cooperation have to be such that cooperation pays for
itself? Cooperation is not costless; the dissolution of previous cooperative arrangements
suggests that cooperation has not always been viewed as desirable by member libraries.

IV. Problems Underlying Cooperation

While cooperation has many appealing characteristics, it imposes special costs on member
libraries as well. Cooperation means sacrificing some local autonomy in collection management
for the greater good of the consortium. In times of budgetary hardship, or when the local demand
for library services changes substantially, it becomes difficult to maintain adherence to the
cooperative arrangement. In fact, beliefs that other members are not maintaining their designated
collection efforts will lead to a breakdown in the cooperative collection development plan. One
way of overcoming this problem is to develop an intermediary organization that monitors the
collection efforts of the member libraries. This approach is more appealing as the number of
libraries participating in the cooperative program rises.

The development of a coordinated collection that can be shared among libraries creates a product
that has some of the characteristics of a public good. As a result, some libraries will attempt to
free ride on the collection efforts of others without investing in specialized acquisitions that they
could trade. Both members and non-members of the cooperative arrangement stand to benefit
from free riding. Building the cooperative system yields benefits to non-members since they now
have access to items they would not have acquired, at low cost. Also, some members may be at
relatively early stages of collection development, and will have a tendency to borrow more than
they lend out. The combined effects lead to some libraries being persistent net lenders while
others are persistent net borrowers. Libraries who are net lenders will find they are losing money
and possibly local loans, as local users may find that the item they seek is unavailable. Since
libraries do not charge each other the true economic cost of borrowing the material, the
acquisition decisions of the libraries will be affected as well.

V. Assessing the Benefits and Costs of Cooperation

A. Benefits

1. Specialization means that library resources are not used inefficiently in trying to cover a wider
scope of materials. Trying to acquire materials incrementally in all areas may be costlier than
focused acquisitions in one specific area. These benefits are not arising from differences in
acquisition prices (though we will want to examine this point), but from the use of resources in
areas where their talents dictate they should be used.
2. Reduces purchases of certain low demand materials that now can be borrowed from other
member libraries. On net, this means some other library in the system must make the purchase,
but that the per unit cost of "producing" the material for borrowing will be lower.
3. Resources are available somewhere in the system, if not at the user's local library. One major
problem with non-cooperation is the possibility that some materials may not be acquired by any
of the libraries. Member libraries are willing to pay, either through an in-kind mechanism such