Cooperative Collection Management

Introduction

1. Mission Statement of the group/federation/consortia
2. Purpose of the policy
   • How will the policy be used for library or federation management, planning, and accountability to the governing organization and library users?
3. Libraries & users groups defined
   • Emphasis on both uniqueness and commonalities
4. Library shared needs defined
   • Not just "more stuff"
   • Give some sense of priorities and guidelines for how you will determine annual collection activity to be funded by the federation.
   • How does your policy relate to the annual federation plan of service.
   • Provide any short or long term goals regarding jointly developing information resources.
   • Why does the federation want to do this and what they see as possible areas for development-formats, subjects perhaps.
   • At the very least, provide a list of possible areas for development over the next few years with a sentence or two justifying each possible area. For example: high demand for audio books not being met locally, or often requested reference information not available locally, or alternative and consumer oriented medical information in high demand partly due to aging population, or whatever.
5. Brief general statement describing existing resources in member libraries
6. Cooperative arrangements within the group
   • How will the group "share" the resources
   • Outside of the group – will these resources be shared with others, what are the guidelines?

General Priorities, Limitations and Policies

1. Nature of resources to be shared
   • Chronological coverage (current, retrospective, historical?)
   • Formats (electronic, print, audio, video, etc.)
   • Multiple copies (if applies)
   • Languages, level (popular, juv, academic, professional?)
2. Funding considerations
   • Commitment regarding maintenance of local effort. Need to address maintenance of local effort regarding collection development. This is essential. The federation or other funding should provide enhancements not replace local funding for regular collection management.
   • Source of funding, etc. (Should try to include all possibilities as your group see it – federation? grants? contributions by members? other?)
   • Ownership of materials (do they need to be identified as purchased with funds from X source? – State does not require items to be identified as being purchased with federation monies. If a library withdraws, who owns the materials/files/items? Etc.)
3. Responsibilities and selection procedures
   • Criteria
   • Selection procedures (collectively, by individual library, duplication among libraries?)
   • Timelines (if appropriate, for example, all orders in by specific date? between September and December each year? does acquisitions need to be done before development of a new plan of service?)
   • Acquisition, processing and invoicing procedures (who will do this – individual libraries, lead library, or ???)
   • Reporting procedures (records of what purchased?)
4. Collection Maintenance
   • Need to address maintenance of local effort regarding collection development. This is essential. The federation or other funding should provide enhancements not replace local funding for regular collection management.
   • Responsibilities for maintenance, weeding, repair, updating, etc.
   • Joint ownership issues for withdrawal (if any)

Subject and Format Areas Collected

1. For any area (subject or format) that they intend to "develop" they ought to provide specific information about existing resources in member libraries, a rationale for improving this area, and goals.
   • This could be done with a table, a narrative, or an outline.
2. Justification of subjects and/or formats to be acquired as a whole.
   • Why are you doing this?
   • Explain how you know this is a need, how you will judge success, why this is best done cooperatively, etc.)
3. Identification of specific subjects with goals and timelines (related to existing resources and planned acquisitions for cooperative plan
4. Identification of specific formats with goals and timelines related to existing resources and planned acquisitions for cooperative plan

Policy Implementation, Evaluation, and Revision

1. Evaluation plan
   • How, when, by whom, will the success of the cooperative collection plan be evaluated?
   • How will we know if we will continue, etc.
2. Revision plan? (how, when, by whom, etc.)
3. Record of action by appropriate governing board/individual for the collective and for the individual members if appropriate.

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