Explore a wide variety of cooperative initiatives—at regional, statewide, and international levels! This book examines a wide variety of cooperative efforts and consortia in libraries, both geographically and in terms of such activities as digitization and cooperative reference services. You'll learn how libraries are cooperating regionally, on the statewide level, and internationally to provide better service to all kinds of users. Cooperative Efforts of Libraries explores aspects of cooperation that include remote storage, virtual reference service, collection development, staff training and instruction, preservation, interlibrary loan, and international cooperation in Latin America and the Caribbean. From the editors: "Cooperation used to mean primarily cataloging via OCLC, interlibrary loan, and perhaps mutual borrowing privileges, but economics and technology are combining to broaden the playing field considerably. This collection reflects this diversity." Part one of Cooperative Efforts of Libraries highlights cooperation in regional and statewide activity. You'll learn about: Part two of Cooperative Efforts of Libraries presents a sampling of the wide variety of cooperative efforts that make libraries so unusual among institutions and librarians so unusual among professionals. In this section, the President of the Center for Research Libraries discusses the increasing cost and physical constraints that make it difficult for hundreds of libraries to store and preserve print copies of the same research materials. This section also examines: