Collection coherence and digital abundance: enhancing the effectiveness of document supply

This article commences with an overview of the changes to library cooperative activity and how these might affect document supply operations. It looks at the increasing emphasis on using ICTs to locate and transfer items, and the corresponding reduction in the importance of ownership and collections. It suggests this is eroding the previous belief in collection coherence and leading to a reduction in efforts to build collections cooperatively between libraries. It argues that libraries have now entered the era of the ‘post‐modern’ collection, and suggests the impact this might have on document supply activity, particularly between consortium members. It concludes with a study of the consortium activities of one academic library, at Murdoch University in Western Australia, in order to illustrate these points.