Making the Common Uncommon? Examining Consortial Approval Plan Cooperation.

Many libraries have entered into cooperative or consortial agreements to reap the cost benefits of electronic purchases, to share a library system vendor, or to divide collection-building responsibilities. However, among such cooperating libraries the formal coordination of approval plan profiles has seldom been attempted. Many questions need to be answered before a group of libraries could enter into a cooperative approval plan. Would the political and administrative costs of designing and maintaining a cooperative profile be sufficiently offset by a broadened overall collection among cooperating libraries? To what degree do libraries acting independently achieve the same approval plan results that a formal coordination of profiles would generate? The Triangle Research Libraries Network (Duke University, North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is comprised of four geographically- close institutions that have been building cooperative collections for more than 50 years. Some of their agreements have been quite formal and others have been quite informal. This study looks at the degree of approval plan overlap among TRLN libraries; at circulation data for these overlapping titles; and at lists of titles not acquired within the consortium. The results may inform the question of whether separate, uncoordinated approval plans already meet the need of the TRLN consortium, or if consortial approval plan cooperation might benefit the group. An examination of monographs in four selected Library of Congress classes supplied to the TRLN libraries by Yankee Book Peddler over a six month period in 1997 provided data to examine issues surrounding a consortial approval plan. The degree of overlap among the four institutions was defined, and circulation statistics showed whether books acquired by multiple libraries had a high level of use. A list of YBP titles not acquired by any of the libraries during the same time period wasalso analyzed, to examine whether formal cooperation might have usefully broadened the overall collection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]