Recent trends in statewide academic library consortia - consortia discussed include Georgia's GALILEO, Louisiana Library Network, OhioLINK, TexShare, and Virginia's VIVA - Resource Sharing in a Changing Environment

Library Trends, Wntr, 1997 by William Gray Potter

Involvement of Large Libraries

The publicly assisted colleges and universities in Virginia have a history of cooperation that serves as a foundation for VIVA. The six doctoral institutions have always supported cooperative efforts and VIVA was no exception. Many of the resources available on VIVA, such as literary texts, were developed by the University of Virginia. George Mason University provides administrative support and houses the VIVA project coordinator. All six doctoral institutions are committed to rapid response for interlibrary lending. Again, the involvement of the largest libraries is evident in a successful project and, again, the involvement is one of a partnering nature.

Governance

VIVA has attempted to avoid a large central staff to manage the project, employing only a half-time project coordinator. Instead, VIVA relies upon a number of committees, headed by a steering committee made up of library directors. There are also several working committees: the collections committee, the interlibrary loan enhancements committee, the special collections committee, the technical issues committee, and the user services committee. In addition, two staff members from the State Council on Higher Education serve as liaisons to VIVA. It should be stressed that higher education in Virginia is highly decentralized. The State Council on Higher Education is charged to recommend policy to the General Assembly. It does not function as a Board of Regents with budget and policy control.

SUMMARY

Beyond these five states, many others could be mentioned as taking new and innovative approaches to statewide cooperation. In the interest of space, however, these five are illustrative of the present situation with statewide academic library cooperation.

Basic Functions of the Consortia

There are three basic functions provided by these consortia. The first is the sharing of physical resources. To this end, union catalogs have been assembled, local systems linked together, interlibrary loan protocols established, courier services provided, an so on. The second function is to provide connections to the Internet and the World Wide Web, including the provision of workstations in some cases. The third function, and the one that is becoming increasingly important, is to provide access to electronic resources, either by mounting them on a local server or providing access to resources on other platforms. Even those consortia that started out with the initial objective of sharing physical resources, such as OhioLINK, are finding that the collective licensing of electronic resources is becoming increasingly important.

Formation and Evolution

All five of the projects discussed above began as consortia of the publicly supported academic libraries in the state. This can be attributed to the fact that these libraries share a common central authority--a central administrative office, such as the Chancellor in Georgia, a central board of regents as in Ohio, or a coordinating agency as in Virginia. This central authority encourages and promotes cooperation as a way to maximize the investment in existing resources and collections and to leverage future investment. Perhaps more important, this central authority provides a single funding authority. Further, the directors of these libraries in each state have a long history of association and cooperation, usually meeting regularly. In Georgia and in Texas, for example, the library directors had been discussing how to use information technology to better advantage for a number of years before funding became available.