Managing Collections in an Automated Network Environment

The goals of cooperation and collection management in academic libraries may sometimes seem mutually exclusive. Individual institutional objectives may compete and conflict with the objectives of networking partners. The political and financial forces driving a college affect its librarians' commitments to cooperative resource sharing. Today's librarians face problems analagous to those of counselors in social service organizations. A mental health agency's counselors have obligations to society, to their profession, to clients, and to the specific agency unit where they practice (comparable in a university setting to the library). Further, they have ethical ties to a larger parent organization (which would be comparable in the academic library model to the university or college itself).