Few, if any, public agencies can claim to cooperate to the extent that public libraries do. The perceived benefits of such cooperation can vary dramatically from state to state and from one type of system, federation, or cooperative to another, but some types of benefits are fairly common. Such benefits include: continuing education, cooperative projects (such as cooperative purchasing agreements), resource sharing (interlibrary loan and networking), and a wide variety of technical assistance. Some of these organizations are multi-type (like Colorado’s Regional Library Service Systems), while others focus exclusively on a single type of library, usually public.
How do the perceived benefits of membership in systems, federations, and cooperatives affect the fiscal health and performance of the nation’s public libraries—especially the “small” ones—those serving populations under 25,000?
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