Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1993

Abstract

The Mid-America Law School Library Consortium celebrated the tenth anniversary of its founding in 1991. Although preceded by informal meetings of law school deans and librarians in the late 1970s, the Consortium was formally constituted in 1981 as a regional group of law school libraries interested primarily in slowing the rise of expenses through greater cooperation and resource sharing. At the time the Union Catalog project was beginning, the group consisted of eighteen institutions in seven states. The Consortium included all accredited law schools in six of the seven states represented. [1]

The guiding philosophy of cooperation and resource sharing has taken several concrete forms over the past decade. From the outset, free interlibrary loan and photocopying were stressed. Several initial projects were fairly modest, albeit labor intensive. These included the compilation and distribution of union lists of audiovisual materials, microform holdings, and a list of primary Canadian materials.

In the fall of 1982, the Consortium launched its most ambitious project to that time: the Mid-America Law School Library Consortium Union List of Serials on OCLC.[2] Several aspects of that project were to provide the model for later endeavors.

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