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Northeast Research Libraries Consortium
Cost Savings, Co-operation & Clout
Richard C. Fyffe
Head, Collections Services
For many years, libraries have recognized the benefits of cooperating with one another to stretch their budgets and extend their collections to improve services for their communities. In recent years, however, networked computing and telecommunications have enabled library-to-library cooperation to become far more powerful. In July 1996, the University of Connecticut Libraries joined with 17 other east-coast research libraries to form the North East Research Libraries consortium (NERL). Members include Boston University, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, New York University, Princeton, Rutgers, Syracuse, Temple, UConn, UMASS/Amherst, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Rochester, and Yale. Our newest member, Notre Dame, demonstrates that in the age of the Internet, geography is less and less a determining factor in academic and scholarly enterprises. NERL is headquartered at Yale University Library and coordinated by Ann Okerson, associate university librarian for collections. NERL's primary purpose is to license electronic resources jointly and to use our combined assets to obtain more favorable price and contractual terms than each individual library could obtain on its own. Not all members participate in all NERL deals. Since 1996, NERL members have signed, or plan to sign, licenses with 16 producers of electronic services. Among the NERL licenses in which UConn participates are Academic Universe (the academic replacement for Lexis/Nexis), ABC-Clio's America: History and Life and Historical Abstracts, and Britannica Online. Other opportunities are being developed. Cost savings are not the only benefit of consortial action, and they are not the furthest reaching one. NERL also offers a forum in which members learn from each other about management and budgeting for electronic resources. NERL also gives its members a voice in the International Consortium of Library Consortia, a group that is attempting to define standards and expectations for licensing agreements. In the world of electronic services, where licenses can override the traditional rights that users expect from the information supplied by libraries, consortia offer important leverage for libraries. Publishers are highly protective of their investments in electronic products and, working alone, libraries often cannot negotiate terms that protect fair use, that permit interlibrary loan, or that allow "walk-in" users to access the information. Sometimes even consortia cannot achieve all these conditions. However, the combined sales and the efficiencies that come from dealing with one customer rather than many motivate publishers and vendors to work more cooperatively. The licensing terms that are set today will serve as standards and precedents for the future; it is therefore doubly important that we seek the best terms possible. Representing some of the finest institutions of higher education in the Northeast (and beyond), the NERL consortium is an important example of the power that can come from the growing inter-relatedness of libraries and scholarship in a networked world.
Contact Richard Fyffe at 860 486-0662 or richard.fyffe@uconn.edu.
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