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Increasingly, publishers are looking to sell through library consortia. The advantages of consortia to publishers include the ability to simplify the sales process, to help publishers increase their market penetration and communication with more libraries, and increase the speed of sales. However, all consortia are not organized in the same way, which requires that publishers work with different consortia in different ways. Publishers will need to continue to maintain their own marketing and sales staff to augment the services that may be available through the consortium, and to overcome problems such as inconsistent communications to libraries. Publishers will also need to have strategies to work with multiple consortia with overlapping memberships.

This paper aims to report on several initiatives towards formation of national consortium among academic libraries in Malaysia. The consortium focused on subscription of online databases.

In July 2004, CDC on behalf of PERPUN members made several initiatives towards formation of national consortium of Malaysian academic libraries. Proposal paper on the formation of the consortium has been submitted to the Ministry of Higher Education. Through “loose consortia” formed, CDC and later known as Malaysian Online E-Resources Consortium (MOLEC) succeeded in negotiating for subscription of online databases and was able to get financial aid from the Ministry of Education to subscribe several databases since 2002.

A commercial databases committee (CDC) was formed in year 2000 as a platform for academic libraries to evaluate, select, negotiate and manage the online databases. Complications involved in online databases subscriptions such as cost increase, license agreement, various formats of usage statistics, merger and takeover of publishers have made PERPUN (Malaysian Standing Conference of National and University Libraries) realize that there is a need for a formal consortium to be formed.

An improved service was established for the benefit of the academic libraries in Malaysia.

A more coordinated approach to consortial dealings is being established in Malaysia.

This is a report on the process and outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the Korean consortia models generally and discuss how the consortium governing body, Korea Education & Research Information Service (KERIS), manages the e‐book consortium effectively from the Korean perspective.

This research is conducted with overall consortia models of online resources by KERIS. Over several years of modeling it has contrived to develop a few consortia modeling patterns in Korea and assess their effectiveness on collection management. The e‐book consortium modeling process entailed the following: identifying the appropriate consortium model, sampling the consortium size for pricing models and selecting the criteria for e‐book title selection.

Two types of e‐book consortium models are presented. One is the subscription model and the other is the purchasing model. Both sharing and purchasing options are quite cost‐effective for Korean universities since they try to balance the digital and paper collections. The consortium model for e‐books in Korean universities was successful and fit into the conservative collection management in Korea for academic use. Also, perpetual access and purchase model is preferred rather than annual access and lease model.

Online resources including e‐books need a sustainable model for continuous access due to budget constraints. Considering the life‐span of information we need to find the appropriate business and service models for all the resources available online. Various criteria for consortia have been presented. No previous research has been conducted on the nationwide consortium model in Korean universities.

This paper aims to share the successful experiences and suggestions from the 2007 Chinese e‐books consortium.

A survey of the participant libraries of the 2007 Chinese e‐books consortium was conducted. Survey results were analyzed.

The consortium improved the Chinese collections with perpetual ownership, and demonstrated the bargaining power that exists through a consortium. Most participants would consider joining the consortium in the future.

Since the 2007 Chinese e‐books consortium has only just been completed, the usage statistics have not been compiled. It will be interesting to see how readers adapt to the Chinese e‐books in the future.

The results have practical implications for the operation of library consortia.

This study provides the latest opinions and suggestions from the consortium participants, which can be valuable to those who are interested in initiating new library consortia. The study results can also be of value to librarians who are considering joining any library consortia.

Are library consortia agile organizations? That is, do they have the leadership capacity to respond quickly to or drive change in complex environments? To explore the related issues of library consortium agility and leadership, the author developed a case study of the Ohio Private Academic Libraries (referred to hereafter as OPAL) consortium, 1998–2007. This chapter describes the OPAL experience and summarizes her findings, conclusions, and recommendations.

Corporations are now collaborating to meet complex global sustainability challenges, which, until recently, were considered beyond the mandate of business leaders. Multi-organizational consortia have formed, not as philanthropic efforts, but to find competitive advantage. To examine the dynamics of an early collaboration of this sort, with a view to suggesting how future inter-organizational projects might be fostered, we pursued an in-depth multi-method case study of “The Sustainability Consortium.” The Consortium has convened Fortune 50 senior managers since 1998. Our analysis uncovers the primacy of “Relational Space” – a rich context for aspirational trust and reflective learning across organizational boundaries, which is enabled by, and in turn gives rise to, collaborative projects. Within this space, an ecology of organizational leaders committed to sustainability can accomplish together what would be impossible in their individual organizations. We explain the viability of this collaboration.

During the past decade there has been a growing consensus that study abroad experiences are valuable not only for students majoring in the language of the country in which they intend to study, but that they also provide vital experiences for students enrolled in business programs. This is a change from the early 1980s when it was rare to find a business program offering study abroad experiences for its students. The increasingly global nature of commerce and the need for business professionals to effectively interact with people in a work force growing more diverse are strong arguments for students to study abroad. In addition to exposing students to different cultures and peoples, the study abroad experience challenges students to function in unknown environments and situations, teaches students about themselves, and forces them to look critically at their own resources and values. It is the ultimate “Problem-Based Learning” experience (PBL).

Academic library consortia activity has become an integral part of academic libraries’ operations. Consortia have come to assert considerable bargaining power over publishers and have provided libraries with considerable economic advantage. They interact with publishers both as consumers of publishers’ products, with much stronger bargaining power than individual libraries hold, and, increasingly, as rival publishers themselves. Are consortia changing the relationship between academic libraries and publishers? Is the role of academic library consortia placing academic libraries in a position that should and will attract the attention of competition policy regulators? Competition policy prohibits buying and selling cartels that can negatively impact the free market on which the Canadian economic system, like other Western economies, depends. Competition policy as part of economic policy is, however, only relevant where we are concerned with aspects of the market economy. Traditionally, public goods for the greater social and cultural benefit of society are not considered part of the market economic system. If the activities of academic library consortia are part of that public good perspective, competition policy may not be a relevant concern. Using evidence gained from in-depth interviews from a national sample of university librarians and from interviews with the relevant federal government policy makers, this research establishes whether library consortia are viewed as participating in the market economy of Canada or not. Are consortia viewed by librarians and government as serving a public good role of providing information for a greater social and cultural benefit or are they seen from a market-economic perspective of changing power relations with publishers? Findings show government has little in-depth understanding of academic library consortia activity, but would most likely consider such activity predominantly from a market economic perspective. University librarians view consortia from a public good perspective but also as having an important future role in library operations and in changing the existing scholarly publishing paradigm. One-third of librarian respondents felt that future consortia could compete with publishers by becoming publishers and through initiatives such as open source institutional repositories. Librarians also felt that consortia have had a positive effect on librarians’ professional roles through the facilitation of knowledge building and collaboration opportunities outside of the home institution.

This chapter explores the feasibility of establishing a consortium for the sharing of electronic resources between two libraries: the University of the West Indies at Mona and the University of Technology, Jamaica, both of which are located in Kingston. After a description of the institutional and library contexts, the two libraries are compared in terms of missions, staffing, funding, and collections and other differences and similarities including the e-resources. To analyze the feasibility of establishing a partnership/consortium, the exploration and evaluation of formation of a consortium were done using three kinds of analysis: a literature review, interviews, and a review of existing processes and documentation. The data gathering methods and results are described followed by a potential blueprint for implementation. The researchers did not interview or solicit the views of the university administrators and governing bodies or government officials as to the feasibility of such cooperation in light of the tentative nature of the investigation. The authors however worked with the premise that with the proper infrastructure, a consortium between the two universities would be viable. Other institutions considering development or formation of potential consortia might find the approach and methods in this chapter useful as a possible methodology.

The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the activities of various library consortia functioning across India. A questionnaire was used to collect information for the present study from Indian consortia and their web sites were also visited to collect data. The study ascertains that consortia approaches help libraries financially and save money through collective access to databases and e-resources as opposed to individual subscriptions. It also suggests that different consortia can be merged to form a single one across a country and provide services to the users. The analysis has been done on the basis of approximate subscription prices conveyed by vendors through oral communications. The chapter highlights how libraries can function in consortia mode to enhance their services to users in the face of dwindling budgets and spiraling costs of scholarly journals and databases. The chapter analyzes and demonstrates that consortia agreements can lead to more judicious expenditure by libraries and suggests areas for further research to gain deeper insights into the activities and functioning of various consortia. It also makes suggestions about formation of a nation-wide collaboration to maximize savings and avoid overlapping access through a number of consortia.