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| In
This Issue
October 1996
New Era in Library Cooperation BMW Electronic Reading Room
New Shelving Installed in Lauinger |
New Era in Library
Cooperation
Interlibrary cooperation isn't what it used to be. Not that the old days have entirely disappeared: Georgetown students and faculty who need books and articles not owned by the University still are able to go to the Interlibrary Loan Office to request that these items be borrowed from or faxed by a cooperating library that does own the desired material. Indeed, over the past five years Lauinger has borrowed increasing numbers of books and articles on behalf of the Georgetown community and is lending ever more books to other institutions (an important point: for cooperation to succeed, there must be mutual benefit among the cooperating entities; otherwise the cooperation breaks down). So Lauinger does still work with local academic libraries such as George Mason and American and more distant institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania. In that sense, traditional cooperation continues. But the Internet and the World Wide Web have wrought major changes in the way libraries cooperate with each other. In Georgetown's case, this change is embodied in the Chesapeake Information and Research Library Alliance (CIRLA), the group with which we have been collaborating since 1993 informally and which became formalized earlier in 1996. Our partners in CIRLA are the University of Delaware, Howard University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Certainly, the CIRLA libraries engage in traditional library borrowing and lending, and the institutions also provide direct borrowing on-site for faculty and graduate students. But, thanks to the Internet, collaborative plans extend far beyond the traditional. First, the Georgetown community will soon see another item on the menu of choices on a GEORGE screen: a direct link to the online catalogs of the five other CIRLA libraries. Faculty will be able to identify the location of desired books or journals and either request an interlibrary loan or go to the owning library. The leverage produced by joining with five other research institutions will also allow us to gain access to large numbers of journals electronically. For example, all Academic Press journals that are held by CIRLA libraries will be available to us electronically for a small additional cost. The Web can bring together collaborative efforts in a manner never before possible. There will be a CIRLA home page acting as an umbrella for the various efforts of these libraries. As each library begins to create new kinds of digital information sources, decisions on what to scan and what not to scan will be influenced by membership in this collaboration. Susan K. Martin, Ph.D.
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