Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

by Martha Kyrillidou

Preprint version. Final print version appeared in Resource Sharing and Information Networks 14, no. 1 (1999), © Haworth Press.

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Abstract

The workshop, "New Collections: New Marketplace Relationships," was held on Monday, August 17, 1998 at the 64th IFLA General Conference. Five speakers, who represented different consortia from Australia, Europe, and the United States, described their experiences in managing the transformation in collection development activities caused by the purchase of electronic resources in research libraries. The five consortia (CIC, UKB, GBV, VIVA, and CAUL), with varying governance and traditions, have followed different strategies in negotiating consortia licenses for electronic resources. The high costs of these new resources have encouraged increased cooperation and may lead to formal international cooperation to foster global access.

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"New Collections: New Marketplace Relationships" was the title of a workshop held on Monday, August 17, during the 64th IFLA General Conference. The workshop convened by Ann Okerson ⁽¹⁾ featured five speakers ⁽²⁾ representing different consortia from four different areas of the world. The speakers included: Barbara McFadden Allen from the CIC, a consortium located in the midwestern USA; ⁽³⁾ John Gilbert from UKB in the Netherlands; ⁽⁴⁾ Elmar Mittler from the GBV in Germany; ⁽⁵⁾ Kathy A. Perry from VIVA in Virginia, USA; ⁽⁶⁾ and John Shipp from CAUL in Australia. ⁽⁷⁾ A short description of each consortium is available at the IFLA web site ⁽⁸⁾ with the highlights of each speaker's presentation. Each speaker briefly described the consortium they represented and talked about the major challenges they are facing.

The workshop's theme emerges in part from the transformation that is taking place in collection development activities with the purchase of electronic resources in research libraries. Collection development has scaled up both on the supply side, the publishing industry, and the demand side, the library.

Electronic resources are often packaged into mega-resources available either via the publishers themselves and/or through aggregator services such as EBSCOhost. Mergers of different publishing companies and aggregator services have characterized the supply side. These aggregators offer access to a variety of databases, indexing and abstracting services and full-text resources, oftentimes through one contractual arrangement. At the same time, the demand side is forming consortia in all sorts of forms and sizes, reinventing old partnerships or creating new ones. Libraries, with constrained budgets hard-hit in the face of double-digit inflation of scientific journals, have leveraged their collection budgets by pulling them together into consortial arrangements and trying to negotiate better deals to provide more resources at a better price to their constituencies.

ICOLC

The advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web has clearly made the world a smaller place and collection development a larger business. The formation of the ICOLC (International Coalition of Library Consortia) in 1997 was probably a natural event in the course of things. ⁽⁹⁾ ICOLC, also known as the Consortium of Consortia, is an informal, self-organizing group, originally comprised of US-based consortia (79 consortia in North America as of August 1998), but quickly expanded to include consortia from Great Britain and other countries such as Australia, Britain, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and South Africa.

The Coalition "serves primarily higher education institutions by facilitating discussion among consortia on issues of common interest" such as "new electronic information resources and pricing practices of electronic providers and vendors." Whereas in the print-based world, the prices of books and serials are set based on long-and-hard-gained market knowledge and expertise, in the electronic world libraries and publishers are sitting around the table trying to figure out the best pricing strategy. Library consortia are negotiating licenses for electronic resources to leverage the shrinking library budgets. At the same time, concerns have been raised that the terms and conditions of these licenses are sometimes upsetting the balance between the rights of copyright owners and users, potentially disrupting scholarly communication.

ICOLC has published a Statement of Current Perspective and Preferred Practices for the Selection and Purchase of Electronic Information (March 1998), an attempt to set some guidelines for current consortial negotiations. It seeks to promote some general principles that serve the interests of effective scholarly communication. The ICOLC statement asks that prices for electronic products be less expensive than their printed counter-parts, since technology should be making the production of electronic resources more efficient; libraries should have the option of buying the electronic product only; pricing should not be excessive as publishers experiment with new online products and libraries should not be called to pay for the entire cost of developing new products; fair use should be allowed in the electronic environment; and archiving of electronic resources should be addressed through license negotiations.

The members of ICOLC form a varied spectrum of library organizations as is the much more limited number, but nonetheless varied consortial structures, represented in the IFLA workshop. A brief description of each consortium follows with some highlights of the challenges each speaker identified.

Consortial Descriptions

Some of the consortia represented in the workshop are wholly or in part government supported (VIVA, GBV, CAUL); others are voluntary associations of libraries that support electronic resource purchasing from the individual library budgets (NERL, CIC). Some represent organizations that were established a long time ago with a recent focus on licensing electronic resources (CIC, CAUL, UKB); others are organizations formed specifically for cooperative licensing of electronic resources (NERL, VIVA). They all tend to have small staff but extensive committee structures. The numbers of resources they license vary from six to 100 databases depending on how one defines a database (Table 1 and Table 2). Three out of the six consortia discussed at the workshop are US based (CIC, NERL and VIVA). The three non-US consortia include two from Europe (GBV from Germany and UKB from the Netherlands) and one from Australia (CAUL).

VIVA is representative of state government sponsored consortia in the US. Others, for example, include OhioLINK, Louisiana Library Network, TexShare, etc. These are statewide initiatives whose support is partially or fully provided from state funds. In the case of VIVA, 39 state-supported and 28 private institutions are participating in consortial activities, which take place in a decentralized, distributed fashion with a coordinator located at George Mason University. VIVA was established and received funding for the first time in the biennium 1994-96. The most recent budget for VIVA covering the period 1998-2000 is available on the Web. ⁽¹⁰⁾ It provides $2,015,000 in 1999-00 for continuation of existing subscriptions, travel and training, and allocations for ILL express delivery, $770,000 in new projects, and another $555,700 in institutional budgets for VIVA priorities. By purchasing the resources as a consortium they realized $5 million in financial benefits during the first year only, and a total of $25 million from July 1994 to June 1998. VIVA's activities are quickly expanding beyond licensing of electronic resources to include interlibrary loan, technical, user services and special collection issues.

The CIC is a consortium of 12 universities involved in cooperative activities since 1958. The CIC covers many areas of a university's life, from minority recruitment and retention to high performance computing collaboration, the 13 library members of the CIC being one of these areas of cooperation. Its Center for Library Initiatives coordinates the activities of the member libraries, and most of the work is done in a distributed fashion along the lines of their strategic planning ⁽¹¹⁾ process. Of the 9 CIC staff, 3 employees devote their efforts to library collaboration - a secretary, a half-time contract coordinator, and the director, Barbara Allen. The CIC Virtual Electronic Library (VEL), a project supported by the United States Department of Education through a $1.2 million Title IIA grant, aims to allow any of the 500,000 students or 35,000 faculty and research staff of the CIC universities to check out a book, print a digital file, listen to a sound recording, view a video, or access and use any of the myriad information resources owned or licensed by the CIC universities. Activities supported by committees staffed with representatives from CIC libraries themselves include collection sharing, interlibrary loan/document delivery, preservation, union lists/shared online catalogs, and electronic content licensing. They have realized more than $5.5 million in financial benefits through consortial purchasing of electronic resources.

NERL does not have as formal or extensive a structure and process as CIC but it represents more institutions (17 academic research libraries in the northeastern part of the US). It is the youngest of the consortia represented in the IFLA workshop, established in 1996. NERL's members share the common objectives of access and cost-containment, joint licensing and possible joint deployment of e-materials. NERL offers a forum in which members can share information about management and budgeting for electronic resources and it focuses on expensive (over $10,000) scholarly e-resources of importance to research institutions. Members do NERL's work on a volunteer basis. ⁽¹²⁾

CAUL is in someway similar to the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). It is a forum where library directors come together and can cooperate or coordinate their efforts in a variety of areas ranging from information policy and scholarly communication to management issues and library statistics. Higher education in Australia has recently undergone major reorganization, reducing the number of organizations involved in research from 90 to 36 in 1982. As institutions had to gradually compete for funding, libraries have felt the need to be more competitive in this environment. With the availability of government funding in 1992, CAUL has coordinated a database access program. The primary aim of the programme was to provide the Australian academic community with access to a range of databases in a manner which is cost-efficient, takes advantage of cooperative purchasing, complements institutional and national infrastructure investment and improves the quality of support for teaching and research. A Federal Government grant of $600,000 permitted the ISI Current Contents database to be mounted at the National Library of Australia and provided free access to all universities for twelve months. Since then, the service has been contracted to OVID Technologies on a cost-recovery basis by a consortium of twenty-nine libraries. Extension of the program was assisted by another Federal Government grant of $2 million over the period of 1994 to 1996. This grant provided support for national network infrastructure and electronic publishing projects. CAUL tested a total of nine products but the cessation of Government funding made them rethink program goals and focus on identifying products and services that can be obtained effectively through consortia action. Currently, to fund the consortium, CAUL levies on its members an annual fee of $1,000 - an arrangement that will be subject to revision in 1999. This fee allows them to fund the activities of the committee coordinating the consortial arrangements and to hire a part-time staff member to liaise with vendors.

UKB, a Dutch consortium of academic and research libraries, and GBV, a German consortium, were the first institutions that composed licensing principles in Europe (October 1997). These principles were issued prior to the ICOLC principles, and followed the publication of the joint licensing principles of the five major library associations in the US (July 1997).

GBV is a regional network of academic libraries in seven states in northern Germany and one of the Pica (a European center for online services) partners in Germany. ⁽¹³⁾ Participants are about 200 academic and 5 public libraries. GBV has a large union catalog of 9 million titles and 20 million holdings, an article citation database with 18.7 million records, an index of German journals, electronic journal subscriptions, and online ordering services that delivered 280,000 items in 1997. It was through GBV's efforts to develop access to full-text resources that the licensing principles came about.

UKB represents 15 institutions: 13 Dutch universities, the Royal Library in the Hague, and the Library of the Royal Academy of Sciences. UKB is a voluntary association and not a purchasing consortium yet. It currently has relatively little experience in purchasing and negotiating for electronic resources but it has decided to move more aggressively into negotiations in 1998. UKB's mission is to promote national scientific information services. It was established in 1977 but was given additional impetus in 1993 through the establishment of the Steering Committee for Innovation in Academic Information, which drafted a middle-term plan (1995-2000) for scientific information services in the Netherlands and the role of academic libraries in them. Agreements have been made on interlibrary lending, coordinated collection building, common subject cataloging and indexing, the establishment of the virtual academic library, and the exchange of corporate information. ⁽¹⁴⁾

Part of the UKB infrastructure is supported by Pica, a European center for library automation and online services used by hundreds of academic, public and other libraries throughout Europe. Pica was founded in 1969 as an organization responsible for automated library cataloging and currently has a central database with more than 20 million records. Pica and the national library in the Netherlands are jointly responsible for the Netherlands Union Catalogue (NCC) which contains bibliographic data for more than 10 million books and 350,000 periodicals in more than 400 libraries. Pica makes integrated databases available and ensures access through a single interface allowing end-user initiated interlibrary lending. Pica also cooperates with German libraries, including the GBV consortium and more recently in 1997 it started a formal cooperation with French libraries through ABES, the French University library coordinator. Pica views itself as the facilitator for arriving at a common European solution for cataloging, as well as, for making available full-text resources. Pica is currently working hard to add full-text access through the many databases they are making available. ⁽¹⁵⁾

Challenges

As is clear form the above descriptions, a variety of culture-specific and politically- driven choices and opportunities are shaping the formation and history of the various consortia. In the Netherlands, one of the major challenges identified by John Gilbert is movement from the local to the national level. Dutch universities have been autonomous and faculty have been instrumental in deciding the composition of library collections. While universities are used to competing with one another, they need to learn to cooperate more closely. Certain conditions make the loss of institutional autonomy less threatening. These include the long tradition of cooperation libraries in the Netherlands; the inability of the institutions to keep up with serial price increases on their own; the shattering of geographical boundaries with the kind of access electronic resources enables; and the scaling up of publishers and subscription agencies that makes urgent the need for libraries to scale up into consortia. Cooperation needs to take place while respecting local autonomy. One approach that shows promise in UKB is the creation of discipline-specific virtual libraries such as the virtual economic library they are creating. There is also a need to invite European scientists to rethink the way they do business in terms of giving away their intellectual property rights. The European Copyright User Platform (ECUP) efforts influence legislative developments in the EU.

Elmar Mittler from GBV emphasized the challenge of moving to global national licenses, particularly for specialized material of interest to comparatively few scientists and researchers. To satisfy the specialized needs of researchers, it is necessary to move beyond local or national licenses into some form of international cooperation. He pointed out that it might be necessary to start thinking in terms of providing access through an affiliate status to institutions in other countries. Because it is hard enough to come up with a single national view on licensing electronic resources, the challenge of creating an international forum may seem impossible to realize, but it is imperative that at least some institutions move the thinking about access to electronic resources from providing access to local users to providing access to users in general. Mittler pointed out that the UK is one European country that has moved into the area of national site licenses, through the National Electronic Site Licensing Initiative (NESLI), ⁽¹⁶⁾ with some degree of success. The UK's efforts serve as a good example for the rest of the world.

John Shipp pointed out how different and unique in some ways are the challenges facing Australian libraries. Australia is approximately the size of continental USA but with a population of 20 million. The 38 universities are located mostly in large urban areas situated along the eastern and southeastern seaboard of the country. All universities rely heavily on the Internet, but the challenge of creating an adequate infrastructure in Australia is still the fundamental one. A second challenge is the nature of the market of Australian libraries - they do not represent a significant portion of the business of the larger multinational publishers. This reduces the libraries' bargaining power, even through a consortium, but at the same time makes the consortial arrangements vital to the future effectiveness of university libraries. Collaboration among librarians takes place, and the history of government funding also provides a basis to finance these activities. However, Australian consortia need to move into international cooperative activities in order to be more effective in negotiations with suppliers.

NERL, one of the US consortia, faces quite a different set of challenges. It is located in a country with a long tradition of cooperation among libraries and an abundance of consortia. Part of the challenge faced by NERL is to focus its activities to meet those needs of their members' libraries that are not met by other similar efforts. NERL focuses on expensive (over $10k) scholarly e-resources that are primarily remote access resources. Another challenge facing a relatively small but highly focused consortium like NERL is the need to rely on its members for staffing on a volunteer basis. As Ann Okerson describes it, NERL offers a model for a licensing organization whose mandate currently is not as extensive as some of the other groups represented at the IFLA workshop.

Kathy Perry describes VIVA as a democratic organization where a great deal of work is accomplished through an extensive committee structure comprising 75 librarians. Membership on each committee is carefully balanced to ensure representation of schools of all sizes, geographic regions of the state, and both public and private institutions. The central staff is kept to a minimum, currently only the director and a part-time assistant.

The librarians working for VIVA originally conceived their role as a linear process: purchase the resource, train the librarians, and move on to the next resource. They have found out that their role is more circular than linear as they license resources in a cyclical fashion. They evaluate each product's usage data, address technical issues, communicate with both the vendor and their colleagues, and renegotiate with the vendor to improve the product in a never ending process.

Perry describes two key components that help this continuous improvement environment: (a) Resource Management Teams and (b) the usage statistics that each product provides. Each Resource Management Team in VIVA is responsible for a specific product. The Resource Management Team is comprised of the Collections Committee contact, a Technical Issues Committee contact, and a User Services contact. The contacts are volunteers from the VIVA member institutions and they work together in many different ways, depending upon the needs and demands of the product. Examples of ways they have worked to make more effective VIVA's use of electronic resources include training, monitoring use, and re-training sessions, etc. Usage statistics, despite their inconsistencies across databases and their limitations, are key in the electronic resources environment and have been used in VIVA to reveal use trends and implementation problems. ⁽¹⁷⁾

Barbara Allen described CIC's challenges as the three Ps: Process, Product and Pricing. Consortia need a process that is deliberative but agile; a deliberate process allows for thoughtful selection and acquisition of key research materials and an agile process allows consortia to take advantage of special unexpected offers. CIC has developed descriptions of their current processes and guidelines for collaborative acquisition, as well as vendor guidelines for submitting proposals to the CIC Center for Library Initiatives.

The second P, product, creates a new set of challenges for authors, publishers and libraries. Electronic products are differentiating themselves from their print equivalents and libraries are facing two formats (print and electronic) that are different in content and coverage from one another. Full-text electronic products need to be organized and made accessible through indexing and abstracting databases, as well as through the traditional library catalogs with the use of open standards. And, they need to be subject to fair use provisions.

The CIC libraries have rejected simultaneous use licensing and believe that simple pricing works best. Allen believes that pricing will become easier to understand and negotiate and that enterprising subscription agencies who consolidate licenses and contracts at a reasonable price will play an important role in fulfilling this goal. As someone who has extensive experience in collaborative projects, she reminded us of Mark Twain's response to his first Wagner opera: "It's not as bad as it sounds."

Conclusion

What can we learn from these presentations? The US-based consortia represented in this workshop offered the pragmatic perspectives that characterize American library developments. They have learned to respect local autonomy while effectively defining their roles in fulfilling hard-pressing needs; they behave in a decentralized collaborative environment in which consortia have flourished; it is not uncommon for a library to find itself to be a member of many different consortia with some strains developing at the institutional level. At the same time, they have learned to respect this diversity and take advantage of redundancies by being good team players.

The European consortia find themselves in a linguistically and culturally diverse and dispersed environment. Central government control is one way to bring some unity and a sense of common direction. The trend towards cohesiveness based on some national centralized control, rather than a free-willing association, is reflected in the funding sources. Higher education institutions have been traditionally government supported, enjoying widespread respect, and thus less vulnerable to risk-taking. At the same time they are limited by the bureaucratic strains of government-supported agencies. Thus, they view the trend towards internationalization of library consortia as a necessary condition in order to be more effective, a strong international vision.

John Shipp jokingly described Australia's challenge as "a country lying in Asia that thinks first world and has a third world economy." Australia has a very strong international vision and, it too would like to cooperate more actively with consortia in other countries. At the same time, CAUL has moved in an Anglo-Saxon pragmatic fashion towards cooperative electronic resource purchasing. Activities originally supported by a centralized government funding structure, are gradually changing to a more, decentralized and distributed funding model.

For all the differences described above, one cannot help wonder how far libraries are from the point of negotiating global licenses to electronic resources. ⁽¹⁸⁾ Will there come a time when there will be enough synergy among the interests of the various libraries and/or consortia to consider coming together to negotiate international licenses? And what might be the product(s) of interest to such a group? Will a combination of funding strategies such as government ⁽¹⁹⁾ or other external funding, such as foundation support, be the catalyst in assisting libraries to gain access to electronic resources, or will simple reallocation of existing library budgets be an adequate strategy to accomplish such a goal?

Libraries have already started taking small steps towards that direction - whether they will continue on this the path and at what speed only time will tell. In the meantime we make progress by continuing to:

Learn from one another—this workshop being one such example.

Move towards formal international cooperation as libraries and universities with similar missions come together to share resources.

Foster global access to electronic resources of discipline-based communities of learning.

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Table 1. General Consortial Descriptions

	CIC	NERL	VIVA	CAUL	UKB (Dutch)	GBV
Established	1958	1996	1994	1928	1977	1996
Members	13	17	39 state-supported + 28 private	38	15	200
Budget	Distri- buted Institu- tional	Distri- buted Institu- tional	Mix of Govt. and Institutional	Mix of Govt. and Institutional	Mix	Govt.
Electronic resources*	12 contracts for 52 dbs	8 contracts, 9 under discussion	21 contracts for 100 dbs	18 dbs	25 dbs	7 dbs
Population served (Size of institutions represented in the consortium)	500,000 students 33,000 faculty 60 million volumes	250,000 students 22,000 faculty 74 million volumes	225,000 FTE students in public institutions and 41,000 FTE students in private	667,000 students 33,000 faculty 19.2 million volumes	165,000 students in 13 universities 12 million volumes	-

* Note that it is very difficult to identify the exact number of products since new licenses are negotiated all the time while old ones may be expiring and not renewed.

Table 2. Examples of Products Licensed/Used

Products	CIC	NERL	VIVA	CAUL	GBV
Academic Press - IDEAL		X	X
ACM		+	+
America History and Life		+
Australian Standards				X
Beilstein	X			*	X
Bibliography of Asian Studies	X	+		X
Britannica Online	X	X	X	X
CDATA96 - census data from Australia				X
Cambridge Scientific Abstract			X
Chadwyck-Healey - LION American Poetry African American Poetry English Poetry English Verse Goethe	X X X X X X		Locally loaded: X X X X	*
Compendex				*
Congressional Universe		X	X
Dow Jones		X	X
Ei Engineering Information				X
Elsevier		+
FirstSearch			X	*
GaleNet Bibliography and Genealogy Master Index Database of Publications and Broadcast Media Encyclopedia of Associations Contemporary Authors Gale's Directory of Databases Research Centers and Services Directories	X X X X X X	+	X X X X X
Highwire		+
Historical Abstracts		+
IAC SearchBank Books in Print Computer Database/ASAP Expanded Academic Index /ASAP General Business File/ASAP Health Reference Center			X X X X X X	X X X X X X
IEEE Electronic Library		+
Index of 18th century German Periodicals					X
ISI World of Science Current Contents	X X	X		* X
INSPEC	X	X		X
International Bibliography of Periodical Literature					X
International Bibliography of the Social Sciences				X
Kluwer		+
Lexis-Nexis	X	X		X
LLBA	X
MathSciNet	X		X	*
MCB				*
NTIS	X
Online Contents					X
Open Text	X		X
OVID (range of ejournal products)				X
Oxford Analytica		+
Oxford English Dictionary			X
Periodicals Contents Index	X		X		X
Primary Source Media		+
Project Muse			X	X
RAPRA Abstracts				*
RLG databases				X
Royal Society of Chemistry		+
Stat-USA			X
Statistical Universe		X
Umi ProQuest		X
Union catalog of the GBV					X

* - used in the past either through trial or license that is not currently renewed
+ - under active review

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Footnotes

1. Associate University Librarian, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut, USA and Coordinator of the NorthEast Research Libraries Consortium (NERL): <http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla64/166-83e.htm>
2. A sixth speaker from Turkey was not able to attend but a description of their efforts is found on the IFLA Web site: <http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla64/164-83e.htm>
3. Director, Committee on Institutional Cooperation Center for Library Initiatives (CIC), Champaign, Illinois, USA: <http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla64/167-83e.htm>
4. John Gilbert is Vice-Chairman of the Netherlands Association of University Libraries, Royal Library and Library of the Royal Academy of Sciences (UKB): <http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla64/161-83e.htm>
5. Coordinator of the Gemeinsamer Bibliotheks Verbund (GBV): <http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla64/163-83e.htm>
6. Project Director, the Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA): <http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla64/165-83e.htm>
7. University Librarian, University of Sydney, speaking on behalf of the Council of Australian University Libraries (CAUL): <http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla64/162-83e.htm>
8. IFLA web site: <http://www.ifla.org/>
9. ICOCL web site: <http://www.library.yale.edu/consortia/>

10. <http://www.gmu.edu/library/fen/viva/budget99-00.html>
11. <http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/second_level/library.html>
12. <http://www.library.yale.edu/NERLpublic/>
13. The other two are the Die Deutsche Bibliothek (Frankfurt am Main, Leipzig, Berlin) and Hebis (the electronic library information system of the German federal state of Hessen).
14. Eveline Berghuis and Adri Staats, State of the Art: Libraries in the Netherlands (1988): 5.
15. Ibid., 19-20.
16. National Education Site Licensing Initiative (NESLI): <http://www.nesli.ac.uk/>
17. The complete text of Katherine Perry's speech can be found at: <http://www.gmu.edu/library/fen/viva/iflatalk.html>. A draft document entitled Guidelines for Statistical Measures of Usage of Web-Based Indexed, Abstracted and Full Text Resources can be found at <http://www.gmu.edu/library/fen/viva/icolcstats.html>. It updates the work of the JSTOR Web Statistics Task Force to be found at: <http://www.library.yale.edu/~kparker/WebStats.html>.
18. The Combined Higher Education Software Team (CHEST), a UK-based effort, has already attracted international participation from Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and potentially Australia. For more information on CHEST, check: <http://www.chest.ac.uk/index.html>.
19. Recently NSF announced a call for International Digital Libraries Collaborative Research, Announcement Number NSF 99-6 (NEW). For more information contact Stephen M. Griffin: <http://www.interact.nsf.gov/cise/contact.nsf/LastName/Griffin?OpenDocument>