RE-INVENTING RESOURCE SHARING

In the latter half of the 1980's there was a drastic decline in the number of monograph acquisitions in academic libraries in the United States. The overriding cause of this decline was the escalation in serials prices which began in the 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s until serial subscriptions had gobbled up the monographs budget and any other funds that could be diverted from other lines into serial subscription payments. Along with the increase in serial subscription prices there were increases in monograph prices, automation and electronic resources expenditures, and static budgets in many libraries. Statistics from the Association of Research Libraries clearly showed that by 1990 monograph acquisitions by volume count had dropped 16 % from 1985 to 1989. 1 Although this fact was known, it was not known how the decline had affected acquisitions by individual subject areas or language groups. In other words what had happened to the collections of academic libraries in the U.S. as a result of this decline? And further what might be the implications of these findings for all types of libraries? Methodology The study which is reported in this paper was undertaken as a dissertation topic which received the first LAPT Research Award. The findings have been previously summarized and reported in the author'