Copyright 1999, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Reprinted with permission. This article may not be posted, published, or distributed without permission from The Chronicle.
By Thomas J. DeLoughry
College librarians, seeking to keep up with a growing demand for electronic resources in tight fiscal times, are discovering that there is strength in numbers.
More institutions are turning to library consortia as a way to combine their purchasing power and win better deals on everything from the electronic version of Encyclopaedia Britannica to data bases of poetry and scientific abstracts. Statewide efforts already exist in Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Ohio, Virginia, and Texas, while interstate groups have been formed among Big Ten research universities and among small liberal-arts colleges.
"We've found that this sort of group purchasing power has really enabled us to leverage the dollars that we have and to get resources we couldn't have otherwise," says Sue Phillips, an associate librarian at the University of Texas at Austin, who is helping to manage the state's TexShare consortium. The group represents 52 libraries at medical centers and public, four-year colleges.
Connie V. Dowell, dean of information services at Connecticut College, says the consortium experience is teaching librarians that they do not have to pay a fixed price for publications. "That whole way of thinking has changed," she says.
Librarians involved in the consortia predict that all institutions will belong to such groups in the future. Cost sharing will become imperative, they say, as publishers produce more electronic materials and make them available in full-text formats, which generally are more expensive than collections of citations and abstracts and place heavier burdens on library computer systems.
Consortia are not a new idea among libraries, which have worked together for decades to coordinate interlibrary-lending procedures and to tie together the electronic catalogues of neighboring institutions. The new wrinkle, librarians say, is the effort to coordinate electronic acquisitions in ways usually not done with books and journals.
Those involved say it is easier to cooperate on the purchase of electronic materials because they are available to all consortium members simultaneously. Efforts to promote the sharing of paper materials have always been hindered by the fact that librarians had to trust their counterparts at other institutions to deliver a book or journal promptly.
"It isn't limited by one piece of paper that only one pair of eyes can look at," says Katherine A. Perry, coordinator of the Virginia consortium, which includes 66 public and private colleges. The effort, known as VIVA, is financed with $5.2-million from the state's General Assembly for the 1994-96 biennium.
A similar effort in Georgia, known as GALILEO, was up and running in the fall, less than 150 days after the state legislature appropriated $9.9-million for it.
Officials there say resource sharing offers benefits for large and small colleges.
Richard A. Skinner, president of Clayton State College, says buying many popular data bases centrally lets larger libraries focus their acquisition budgets on specialized resources, while smaller institutions, such as his, get access to data they could not afford otherwise. "In an information age, that ability to level the playing field is going to become crucial," he says.
Ralph E. Russell, university librarian at Georgia State University, says GALILEO also relieves many small colleges of the burden of loading huge data bases on their computers and of employing staff members to troubleshoot such systems. All of the electronic resources that the group has licensed are loaded on computers at the University of Georgia and Georgia State that are accessible through Peachnet, a network linking state colleges.
Mr. Russell says technical considerations will attract more institutions to consortia as publishers produce more full-text and image-based data bases, which require sophisticated computer systems. "Everything from storage space to transmission system to receiving mechanism is more costly when you get to that," he notes.
The 13 institutions that make up the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a Midwestern group of research universities, are sharing the technical burden by agreeing to load one data base on each campus and to make its contents available to each other through the Internet. Security measures on each data-base server require that users have e-mail addresses at one of the 13 institutions to gain access to the information.
In Virginia, the six doctorate-granting universities in the VIVA group run all of the shared data bases on their computers. Charlene S. Hurt, chairwoman of VIVA's steering committee and director of libraries at George Mason University, says the Internet's World-Wide Web gave a big boost to consortia because of its ability to link campuses regardless of their computer systems. "The technology has made a leap that has made it much easier to do these kinds of things," she says.
Others note that the consortia have prospered because they also offer advantages to the vendors who sell collections of electronic abstracts and journals.
"As a group, we'll pay the vendor more money than they can realistically get by slogging it out school by school," says Tom Sanville, executive director of OhioLINK. His group includes more than 40 colleges and universities.
The publisher of Encyclopaedia Britannica has acknowledged the benefits. It provides discounts to consortia of institutions when they designate one negotiator and one technical person to be responsible for licensing "Britannica Online."
"Consortium selling is really a win-win situation for the consortium and vendor," says Joseph J. Esposito, Britannica's president. "Instead of our having to negotiate with three or four thousand schools, we find that one negotiation handles 10 or 20 or 30."
He estimates that more than half of the 293 institutions using "Britannica Online" are doing so under consortium-based licenses. Many would not have been able to afford a license on their own, he says, because the prices start at $2,500 a year.
Carleen Nelson, vice-president of sales at Ovid Technologies Inc., says more vendors are responding to demands from the customer for consortium-based pricing. "Would it have been something vendors would have initiated?" she asks. "I'm not so sure."
Ovid, which makes software for conducting electronic searches, contracts with data-base publishers to provide their information to colleges using its software.
Ms. Nelson estimates that 30 per cent of Ovid's contracts in academe are with consortia of institutions, and she expects to see that number rise. "I'm not sure where it stops. It just keeps going."
Librarians report that vendors, as a whole, are much more willing to sell to groups of institutions than they were just a few years ago. Negotiations, however, can still be complicated. Some companies want licenses based on the number of institutions involved, while others base their prices on the total number of students involved or even the number of local townspeople who might use a university's library.
"You have multiple patterns that you're dealing with," says William A. Gosling, an assistant director of the University of Michigan's libraries, who has negotiated licenses for the C.I.C. group. He notes that few vendors are willing to sign licenses of more than two years' duration, because they consider the arrangements to be experimental.
Another problem, librarians say, is the difficulty of getting 20 or 40 libraries to agree on what to buy. The groups have established acquisitions committees, which are charged with deciding what resources the consortia should purchase.
"It's not an easy question to deal with," says Ms. Phillips, of the TexShare group. It has a mix of urban and rural institutions and large and small libraries on its acquisitions committee, to insure that the resources selected are useful to all.
It is possible, many librarians say, that subgroups will be formed within the various consortia by colleges that want to acquire specialized data bases that don't interest the consortium as a whole. In fact, some predict a future full of new consortia, named with new acronyms, that will have overlapping memberships based on the interests of the libraries involved.
"There's going to be a lot of mixing and matching," says Robert Wedgeworth, university librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His university already belongs to the C.I.C., to a group of academic libraries in Illinois, and to ILLINET, a consortium that includes college and public libraries.
"One of the problems is trying to sort out which kinds of decisions should be made in which groupings, so you don't have overlapping licenses," he says. "This is going to get ever more complex before too much time passes."
Ms. Dowell, at Connecticut College, agrees. Her institution is already sharing resources with nearby Trinity College and Wesleyan University, and with the Oberlin Group of Liberal Arts Colleges, an organization of 73 institutions that meets annually at Oberlin College.
The future will be confusing, she says, but joint buying will ultimately enable colleges to do much more with limited resources. She predicts that institutions will not stop with library data bases. Decisions on whether to purchase "WordPerfect" or "Microsoft Word," for example, could also be made jointly.
"In the future," she says, "we'll be negotiating site licenses for software and all sorts of things -- not just data bases."
Last updated February 18, 2000