Novel ways for cooperation to enhance academic library professionalism.

This is not so much one case study as a description of outcomes from a series of cases, based on our experience at Middlesex University in different but related projects concerning the modernisation of libraries in developing countries. For many years, libraries, particularly academic or special libraries, were stable institutions, purchasing books and printed journals to the extent that their budget would allow, cataloguing and classifying them and then making them available by placing them on open shelves or closed stacks. Libraries in developing countries were in the same situation, except that their budget was less and the books and journals more expensive because everything they received had to come by post half way round the world at great cost. So they could buy even less. Academic libraries in general discarded only books which were damaged unless they ran out of space in which case they might have to select carefully material for disposal. Libraries were staffed by librarians who had been taught the same kinds of topics as their grandfathers (or should I say also their grandmothers) before them. In many cases this still applies in a number of developing countries. The course curriculum for librarians has never been updated to take into account electronic sources of information, electronic journals and now e-books.