Proposal for a Division of Responsibility among American Libraries in the Acquisition and Recording of Library Materials

MONEY can be saved by reducing duplication of work and materials. Library resources can be made more widely and more readily available by centralizing information and they can be increased by coordinating the efforts of research libraries. One or another of these general propositions, or a combination of them, has been involved in every cooperative plan that librarians have undertaken or discussed. If the discussions have been more numerous than the achievements, the latter are far from insignificant. Many possibilities have long been evident, and the American Library Association, in its charter, . gave as one of its purposes the inducing of "cooperation in all departments of bibliothecal science and economy." A plan for expansion of Poole's Index by cooperative indexing of periodicals was unanimously adopted at the first meeting of the Association in 1876; this first great periodical index is then, in part, a product of library cooperation. Still earlier, nearly a century ago, Charles Coffin Jewett, then librarian of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, proposed a plan for centralized cataloging that, if it had been carried out successfully, might have saved the libraries of the country millions of dollars. T h e scheme failed, partly because of mechanical difficulties with the stereotype plates that he hoped to use for master copy and partly because he was ahead of his time. But, after Herbert Putnam became Librarian of Congress, the distribution of printed cards was begun and centralized cataloging became a reality on a large scale. There have been various other efforts toward cooperative cataloging, and the project begun ten years ago to supply cards for books not acquired by the Library of Congress will, it is hoped, expand considerably in the immediate future under Mr. MacLeish's administration.