The Centralized Libraries of the Oregon State System of Higher Education

COLLEGE A N D UNIVERSITY LIBRARIANS are becoming increasingly conscious of the possibilities of cooperation. They are realizing that concerted effort must be made if the book resources of the nation are to serve scholarly and research needs effectively. Types of cooperation include interlibrary loans, union catalogs, union lists, cooperative bibliographical projects, limiting fields of purchase and emphasizing certain areas of specialization, cooperative bookbuying, agreements regarding the collection of documents and reproduction of books and manuscripts on film, surveys of book resources in a given area, and consolidations which include legal contractual arrangements and mergers. Examples of cooperation and/or consolidations are: The University Center in Atlanta, the University of North Carolina-Duke University cooperation, Claremont Colleges, Fisk University and Meharry Medical College, Joint University Libraries at Nashville, Atlanta University Library, Western Reserve 1 Part of unpublished Master's thesis, "College and university library consolidations," Graduate Library School, University of Chicago, 1939. University Library, Dillard University, the merger between Howard Memorial Library-Tulane University-Newcomb College, developments in the AtlantaAthens region, and the centralized libraries of the Oregon State System of Higher Education. A brief review of what has been accomplished in Oregon may give some conception of the problems involved and of the possibilities and opportunities for book resources and library service which may be realized through consolidation. The centralized libraries include the libraries of Oregon's six state supported institutions of higher education. Their consolidation in 1932 was part of the State Board of Higher Education's general reorganization of the institutions, and their administrative plan follows, in general, the plan set up for the system as a whole. Four of these institutions are located in the Willamette Valley: the University of Oregon at Eugene and the Oregon State College at Corvallis are forty miles apart, the Oregon College of Education at Monmouth is only eighteen miles from the latter, and the Medical School in Portland is eighty-four miles from Corvallis. The two remaining state supported institutions have been established recently in the southern and eastern