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The purpose of this paper is to explore conceptually the role of higher education consortia in facilitating the operational advancement of member institutions, and in enabling their development as learning organizations in a changing and competitive higher education environment.

This article synthesizes the literature on higher education consortia and organizational learning and develops propositions to support future inquiry.

While some institutions of higher education do indeed learn, the power that consortia hold to extend, expand, and exploit this learning may represent a vast, untapped resource. Through a better understanding of the role that consortium participation may play in organizational learning, a roadmap may be generated for higher education institutions to achieve the cultural and strategic shifts necessary to develop new directions for the delivery of educational content. This enhanced understanding also may help sustain the culture of, and innovative practices used by, learning organizations.

Consortia have the potential to offer a wide variety of benefits to institutions of higher education through innovative structure, operations, and delivery methods, generating tremendous potential for institutions of higher education to become more effective learning organizations.

As institutions of higher learning continue to form collaborative partnerships through higher education consortia, interesting questions arise about the potential unexplored value of these institutional networks. This article suggests that the interplay of diverse practices and sharing of related organizational knowledge across institutions may provide an opportunity for learning and adaptation within them.

That institutions of higher education should cooperate with one another is hardly an uncommon idea. In recent years, especially since colleges and universities began to feel pressures for growth and, later, constraints of financial stringency, the general concept of interinstitutional cooperation has been advocated with enthusiasm and near unanimity; national commissions have recommended it and governments have virtually demanded it. But what is much less common is knowledge about the formal arrangements by which cooperation has been achieved widely in the United States and now is the object of serious consideration and some application in other countries. The consortium is not the only application of the cooperative idea. Councils, coordinating boards, compacts, federations, are all forms of cooperative arrangements among colleges and universities, but the inter‐institutional lexicon is not exact and these forms are not distinct. Because the consortium is the most formal and complex organization for inter‐institutional cooperation, it represents well almost all of the characteristics and problems of all cooperative endeavor between higher educational institutions. Thus, the observations and conclusions made about the consortium have a broader applicability. This discussion will address four basic questions about inter‐institutional cooperation as represented by the consortium: What motivates colleges and universities to cooperate with one another? What are the advantages of inter‐institutional cooperation? What are the disadvantages? What are the organizational and managerial problems of the consortium?

This paper states the case for the consortium in higher education and then examines a consortium with which the writer has familiarity. The study of Manitoba's Inter‐Universities North raises questions about the applicability of the consortium idea to the offering of academic programs. It also suggests that a consortium can become a disjointed, direction‐less organization. Recommendations are made for other institutions contemplating the establishment of a consortium.

In recent years libraries worldwide have been affected by an uncertain financial environment in which resource buying has been restricted, causing them to look at ways of extending their purchasing capabilities to compensate for reduced budgets. In the UK, the British Library Research & Innovation Centre (BLRIC) has recently awarded a grant to Bournemouth University Library & Information Services to investigate the activities of library purchasing consortia in four types of library: higher education, further education, public and health libraries. The project remit also includes a study of library suppliers in the deregulated marketplace following the abolition of the UK Net Book Agreement in autumn 1995. This paper charts the progress of the research that has identified a number of LIS consortia, focuses on the context that has encouraged their formation and presents early findings that illuminate cooperative purchasing activities.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the current situation and the social and economic benefits from the consortia acquisitions of electronic resources by the China Academic Library and Information System (CALIS) South China Regional Centre and to recommend improvements for consortia acquisitions.

Analyses of price and usage made within the CALIS South China region of databases from a range of suppliers including EBSCO, LexisNexis and Springer are presented.

The electronic resource acquisitions by the CALIS South China Regional Centre have yielded remarkable social and economic benefits as the range of electronic collections has been expanded and enriched, benefits have accrued, money has been saved and it has proved to be of benefit to users; however, there is room for improvement. During the last three years, the total usage of the South China Consortia has increased but the usage of the member libraries in the consortia is unbalanced and there are big gaps among the member libraries. The single download/search cost of the e‐resources has been gradually decreasing but the cost of the e‐resources purchased by the South China region consortia is higher than that of the national consortia; hence, there is a need for further reductions.

The study is the first of its kind ever conducted in China. The findings of this paper will be helpful in improving electronic resource consortia acquisitions in the South China region.

Three different governing boards of higher education in Louisiana joined together to create the Louisiana Online University Information System (LOUIS). Key players in this endeavor describe progress from an idea formulated in 1990 to the 1993 reality of an effective statewide online system. Improved services to users and more effective use of collections are examples of what the various libraries throughout Louisiana are expecting to realize from this collective action. Various lessons learned are detailed. Budget components are addressed openly. In 1993, the state of Louisiana was awarded a federal $2.48 million grant that enabled the completion of this statewide infrastructure. Other states contemplating a statewide library network may want to look closely at the planning for and implementation of LOUIS.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the student mobility programs of the three initiatives – in Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization-Regional Institution of Higher Education and Development, University Mobility in Asia and Pacific (UMAP), and Campus Asia – and provide a comparative analysis of the respective programs in terms of the role of government, institutional involvement, quality assurance, and challenges. In addition, the paper will assess their impacts on higher education regionalization by regulatory models toward the end of the paper.

The study adopts qualitative document analysis as a major research method to explore the developmental models of three student mobility programs. Document analysis is an approach used to gather and review the content of existing written documentation related to the study in order to extract pieces of information in a rigorous and systematic manner.

ASEAN International Mobility for Students (AIMS), Collective Action for Mobility Program of University Student in Asia (CAMPUS Asia), and UMAP student mobility schemes have a shared purpose in higher education regionalization, but with different regulatory frameworks and Functional, Organizational, and Political approach models. AIMS and CAMPUS Asia as a strong network and government-led initiatives adopt a combination of functional, organizational, and political approaches; UMAP provides university-driven regional mobility programs with a hybridized force. However, all three of them face the same challenges at regional and national levels, such as different national regulation, coordination among participants, and implementation of credit transfer schemes.

The scale of three student mobility programs is still low, which results in limited impact on higher education regionalization in Asia. However, a stronger decision-making model and increased financial support to universities and students are desirable for the creation of a sustainable and effective network.

This is an original research and makes a great contribution to Asian nations.

ASVIN was a project funded by the Research Support for Libraries Programme (RSLP). The principal aim was to develop better co‐operation between nine UK libraries in the veterinary and animal health field. The project examined a number of library related areas, such as journal archiving, collection development policies, development of a common Z39.50 catalogue interface, grey literature, electronic journals and consortia purchasing. This paper examines the latter issue, taking a brief look at the historical developments and exploring the reasons why libraries enter consortia. It then focuses on the effects upon collection development, models of consortia and describes the ASVIN experience.

Information and communication technology (ICT) development in South African libraries cannot be understood outside the context of the post‐apartheid period. The society consists of a technologically sophisticated sector, and an underdeveloped Third World sector. Higher education and other libraries attempt to straddle this divide. Government policy emphasises the importance of connectivity in redressing inequality. Policy is a contested area, and investigations have been conducted with little concrete result. The main development has been the emergence of academic library consortia, which have succeeded in attracting funding from the USA and other foundations. But without information literacy, these developments will have little impact. There are grounds for techno‐pessimism, as digital information resources are seen by advanced countries as commodities for which payment must be made, even if knowledge production originally took place in the South.

The Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) consists of 128 libraries. This paper aims to present an analysis of collection and open educational resources (OER) initiatives undertaken by CARLI over the past decade that contribute to improving college affordability.

After reviewing important literature pertaining to library consortia and college affordability, this paper presents a detailed case study of CARLI’s collection and OER initiatives.

Owing to their economies of scale, library consortia have the potential to make substantial contributions to improving college affordability.

Compared to the efforts of individual libraries to improve college affordability, library consortium efforts have received far less attention in the professional literature. The work of the CARLI consortium documented here can provide a template for other library consortia that are working to improve college affordability.