Ms. Child often addresses groups to promote this point of view and encourage grant applications based upon it. Her talks, to people unused to hearing these ideas, are iconoclastic, sometimes electrifying and persuasive. All institutions should reexamine their goals and policies with regard to acquisitions, reference, preservation, and so on, and figure Out the long term costs of keeping material, before acquiring it. This cannot be emphasized strongly enough. More is NOT better.
Resource sharing is common in libraries.
It needs to be done in archives as well, both regionally and nationally, in connection with collecting, using, and preserving materials. Like the proverbial mountain which is climbed just because it is there, it sometimes appears that repositories have collected and retained materials simply because they were there. I am a great believer in periodic reappraisal of one's holdings and weeding of materials which no longer fall within one institution's collecting policy or which have proved to be of little or no interest to any user. When they begin to deteriorate, their lives will not be prolonged by artificial means because by then their informational value will presumably have been exploited. This talk was along the same lines as the talk before the Society of Georgia Archivists.