Co-operative development of information resources in Hong Kong academic libraries

The academic libraries of Hong Kong have achieved considerable success in developing large scale print and electronic resources to support the teaching, learning and research needs of their respective institutions. While reasonably well funded by the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region through the University Grants Committee, these libraries nonetheless face similar challenges to most libraries around the world in dealing on the one hand with the declining spending power of their budgets, while at the same time catering to the demands of a broader more inter-disciplinary teaching curriculum and more extensive research needs. To address this, the Hong Kong academic libraries have joined together in extensive co-operative initiatives to improve the level of access to resources for their communities, and to enhance the cost-effectiveness of their resource expenditures. This paper examines a number of the co-operative agreements and projects undertaken by Hong Kong’s academic libraries as one approach to the development of a shared information resource.