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Unit 4: Library Cooperation

4.1.2 An Historical Overview of Library Cooperation Notes

Library cooperation is age old and can be traced to 200 B.C. when Alexandria Library shared its
resources with Pergamon Library. According to Kraus, there existed library cooperation among
monastery libraries in the 13th century. There were exchanges of agreements among the
universities of Lund, Abo and Greifswald as early as 1740. The other examples of library
cooperation include a projected union catalogue of the libraries of Weimar and Jean and a
proposal for a coordinated acquisition scheme for Walfenbuttel and Gottengen. The ‘Catalogue
of Manuscripts in various parts of India’ complied by Whitney Stokes in 1868, and in 1863 Part I
of Sanskrit manuscripts in private libraries of North-west provinces covering Varanasi was
published. The first major union list entitled ‘A Catalogue of Scientific and Technical Periodicals’
was compiled by Henry C. Bolton in 1885.

Notes With the advent of the 20th century, the Library of Congress started cooperative
cataloguing projects and began working on the National Union Catalogue. Thereafter, in
the 20th Century the compilations and publications of union catalogues of different types
increased in number in most countries.
The first library cooperation activity in India is reported to be the Catalogue of Manuscripts
complied by Whitney Stokes in 1868. Union catalogue development was one of major cooperative
efforts in Indian libraries up to the 1960s. We can look at the following union catalogue
development activities:
1918: Catalogue of Scientific Serial Publications in the Principal Libraries in Calcutta
complied by Stanley Kemp, Asiatic Society of Bengal.

1931: List of Scientific Periodicals in the Bombay Presidency. Royal Institute of Science,
Bombay.

1953: Catalogue of Periodicals in CSIR organizations corrected up to December 1953 CSIR,
New Delhi. Union Catalogue of Learned Periodical publications in South Asia, vol.1:
Physical and Biological sciences compiled by S.R. Ranganathan and others. ILA, Delhi.

1956: Catalogue of Medical Periodicals in Indian Libraries corrected up to December 31,
1955. 4th ed. Director General of Health Services, Delhi.
1968: A Union List of Learned American Serials in Indian Libraries. Indian Council for
Library Development.
The 1960s also saw a large number of ILA and IASLIC national seminars devoted to the concept
of library cooperation. However, with the advent of computers in library work, a change occurred.
It is reported that the first use of computer in library work for the production of the Union List
of Serials in 1964 using the IBM/602 machine at INSDOC. Since then library automation has
been a matter of primary importance in Indian Libraries. With the establishment of the National
Informatics Center (NIC) in 1975 and the development of NICNET in 1977, networking and
communication technology in India received a major boost. This as a whole had a major influence
in resource sharing among various libraries and information centres through networks. In 1984,
the working group of the Planning Commission headed by Dr. N. Seshagiri recommended
modernization of library services and inter linking of library systems in the seventh plan. The
1990s are said to be the golden period of library networking in India. There has been a plethora
of publications and seminars on library networking during this period. Today besides INFLIBNET,
there are various local library networks in India such as ADINET, BONET, BALNET, CALIBNET,
DELNET, MALIBNET, MYLIBNET, and PUNENET etc.

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