Explore a wide variety of cooperative initiatives—at regional, statewide, and international levels! This book examines a wide variety of cooperative efforts and consortia in libraries, both geographically and in terms of such activities as digitization and cooperative reference services. You'll learn how libraries are cooperating regionally, on the statewide level, and internationally to provide better service to all kinds of users. Cooperative Efforts of Libraries explores aspects of cooperation that include remote storage, virtual reference service, collection development, staff training and instruction, preservation, interlibrary loan, and international cooperation in Latin America and the Caribbean. From the editors: “Cooperation used to mean primarily cataloging via OCLC, interlibrary loan, and perhaps mutual borrowing privileges, but economics and technology are combining to broaden the playing field considerably. This collection reflects this diversity.” Part one of Cooperative Efforts of Libraries highlights cooperation in regional and statewide activity. You'll learn about: Metro, a multitype cooperative designed to coordinate the implementation of virtual reference among libraries in New York City cooperation between remote, rural, and isolated libraries in the Northern Great Plains and Rocky Mountain West regions, including the creation of the Online Dakota Information Network (ODIN) and similar organizations a Virtual Library of Virginia project in which the highly specialized skills of librarians were used to enhance vendor-supplied MARC records for a much more accessible full-text database the efforts of each university within the state system in Florida to contribute digitized versions of rare and specialized Floridiana to a joint electronic collection which is available to everyone in the state a centrally funded project to support the information literacy efforts of librarians at each campus of the California State University System and make all of them available at the other campus libraries a joint collection development project within the state universities and community and technical colleges of Minnesota the successful lobbying effort which brought them a $3 million annual supplement to cooperatively redress past underfunding for collections the history of resource sharing in Louisiana, Illinois, and Texas—detailed and extensive analyses Part two of Cooperative Efforts of Libraries presents a sampling of the wide variety of cooperative efforts that make libraries so unusual among institutions and librarians so unusual among professionals. In this section, the President of the Center for Research Libraries discusses the increasing cost and physical constraints that make it difficult for hundreds of libraries to store and preserve print copies of the same research materials. This section also examines: a collaborative digital reference project among three small liberal arts college libraries in New England the history of cooperative collection development among three Pennsylvania college libraries the University of Kansas Libraries' efforts to establish cooperative education programs to microfilm brittle books and create microform masters of embrittled volumes—which are then made available for sale to other libraries an American university's offer of interlibrary access to the students and faculty of an Armenian university where resources are severely limited the challenges of providing interlibrary loan in Latin America the planning of an international summit cosponsored by the Southeast Florida Library Information Network, a regional multitype cooperative in South Florida, and IFLA, designed to lay the groundwork for further cooperative efforts between U.S. libraries and libraries in Latin America and the Caribbean

In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.

In this book, we present a hypothesis that humans may be on the threshold of a new historical stage, one characterized by cooperation, democracy, the equitable distribution of resources, and a sustainable relationship with nature. We can act strategically on a range of activities to become a more cooperative society.

In celebration of cooperatives’ contributions to community development processes and outcomes worldwide, the United Nations designated 2012 as the Year of the Cooperative. Today, as in the past, cooperatives have proved effective in bringing people and organizations together to accomplish a broad array of goals related to fostering social and economic innovation, protecting communities against poor living and working conditions, and promoting a better quality of life. Analytically, as both a movement and as a business model, cooperatives hold much potential for generating the types of synergies, collaboration, and productive and social processes that enable community development to thrive in a variety of local, regional and global contexts. This collection of articles chronicles new developments in the ways in which cooperatives are used in a diverse array of community contexts. They offer insight as to what these changes mean, both empirically and theoretically, for community development in the decades to come. This book is a compilation of articles published in the journal Community Development.

Boundary disputes in the South China Sea have been a long-standing threat to peace and security in East and Southeast Asia. Without agreed definition of boundaries, provisional arrangements to develop resources in the disputed area have become the favored, and most effective, solution. Therefore, joint development between various countries has taken place in the form of ad hoc arrangements with the goal of achieving positive outcomes for all parties involved. Incorporating insights from ten authors from six countries (Brunei, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam), this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the incentives and policies to joint development in the South China Sea disputes. The authors also discuss the bottlenecks and proposed policy options. The authors ease doubts over joint development in South China Sea disputes and shed light on creative ways to promote cooperation. The book is a key reference for students and scholars in politics and international relations, Asian Studies, and maritime law.

Since the financial crisis of 2008 and the global popular protests of 2011, more people have begun to wonder and speculate: what’s next for civilization? The economic, social, and political status quo seems unsustainable, but what can emerge to take its place? In this book, a historian examines the past and present to argue that the seeds of a more humane society are already being planted, on local and international scales. Whether they will bear fruit depends, ultimately, on grassroots initiative. Focusing on the new worker cooperative movement in the West, this study not only contains the first systematic discussion of the solidarity economy in the light of Marxist theory; it also introduces a major revision of Marxism that both updates it for the twenty-first century and illuminates our historical moment. It includes an analysis of the history of cooperatives in the U.S., showing where they went wrong and how we can correct their past mistakes. It has a case-study of the successful new worker-owned business New Era Windows in Chicago, which has been celebrated internationally for its defiance of conventional paradigms. And it shows a way out of the age-old conflict between Marxism and anarchism, arguing that both are more relevant now than they have ever been. Which is to say: a gradualist “revolution” is, for the first time, within the realm of possibility.