What is Consortia - Librarians Portal

Library Consortia

 The basic principle of consortia is that its members can cooperatively achieve more than what they can achieve as individual institutions.

a) Definition: According to American Heritage Dictionary a consortium is “a cooperative arrangement among groups or institution,” or “an association or society”. According to Oxford English Dictionary, “Consortium means temporary cooperation of a number of powers, companies, etc. for a common purpose. It is an association of similar type of organization / institution who are engaged for producing and servicing the common things / for providing services for a specific purpose of its users.”

Library consortium is a “community of two or more information agencies which have formally agreed to coordinate, cooperate or consolidate certain function” to achieve mutual objectives. It is an association of a group of libraries to achieve mutually the joint benefits. It provides a way for its members to conduct business in a comparative manner.

b) Prerequisite for Consortia: Technological developments, electronic publishing of scholarly journals, emergence of consortia, pricing models of publishers are some of the factors that create the condition for the development of the library consortia.

i) Emergence of Electronic Document: The whole world is moving towards electronic publishing and the cost of the electronic publishing is much less than that of the print version. The users also hope to have access to their learned journals article in electronic form.

ii) Access to Electronic Resources is a Precondition for a Modern Library: Library materials have grown exponentially in many forms and formats like e-books, e-journals, etc. and all these are very essential for the survival of the library itself.

The limitation in finance, space and manpower also stresses upon the need for library consortia.

c) Use of Consortia: a Library consortium increases the Cost Benefit per Subscription. The other advantages are:

i) Reduced Information Cost: Many libraries currently subscribe only to those journals that they can afford. Though interested in other journals yet they cannot afford to provide access to them. Consortia approach helps them to provide the access.

ii) Access to More Resources than the Capabilities: A number of publishers offer consortia. If the library’s purchase power is big enough they provide access to their whole range of journals – that is, every member of the consortium gets electronic access not only to the journals currently subscribed to but also to all the journals published in the field.

ii) Promoting the Rational Use of Funds: By forming consortia the purchasing power of the collaborating institutions can expand the resource availability and offer automated services.

iii) Ensuring Continuous Subscription: The continuous subscription to the periodicals subscribed is ensure in library consortia.

iv) DDS: Inter-libraries loan services will grow and it is interlinked with the search of the union catalogues which will build effective DDS. Delivery of documents will be fast, either electronically through Xeroxing, fax, courier or e-mail.

Consortia will give the library and also the user extended access- that is, better service for reduced costs. With subscribed resources accessible online in electronic format, the member libraries would have less pressure on space requirement for storing and managing print- based library resources. Moreover, all problems associated with print media such as their wear and tear, location, shelving, binding, organizing, etc. would not be an issue for electronic resources.

d) Popular Library Consortia in India: Library consortia has become quite popular in India and many intuitions some of which are furnish below has made use of it.

i) Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) e-Journals Consortium http://124.124.221.7

ii) The Forum for Resource Sharing in Astronomy & Astrophysics (FORSA) http://www.iiap.res.in/library/forsa.html

iii) Health Sciences Library & Information Network (HELINET) http://www.rguhs.ac.in/hn/newhell.htm

iv) Indian National Digital Library in Engineering Sciences and Technology (INDEST) Consortium.  http://paniit.iitd.ac.in/indest

v) UGC-DAE Consortium for Scientific Research. http://www.tifr.res.in/~libws

vi) UGC- INFONET.  http://web.inflibnet.ac.in/info/ugcinfonet/ugcinfonet.jsp

vii) ISRO Library Consortium, ICMR Library Consortium, etc.