From the issue dated October 10, 2003
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Libraries' Consortium ConundrumBanding together has become the way to save money by making deals with publishers, but rising competition threatens cooperationBy SCOTT CARLSON In 1999, when times were flush for the library at St. Ambrose University, John
Since then, as his budget has gotten leaner, he has had to use all his creativity to whittle down his spending -- but he hasn't given up databases and services in the process. How? By working with a statewide consortium to get 16 full-text databases for a total of $1,200 a year. He also belongs to a group of libraries that catalogs books, which saves him $40,000 a year in librarians' salaries. Through another consortium he buys 4,000 electronic books annually for about a dollar each. Adding the same number of books to his paper collection would cost $150,000. His library has also benefited from tens of thousands of dollars in grants from private foundations. The consortia secured the grants to help pay for databases and other information tools. Tough times and rising costs have taught librarians at many colleges across the country that there is strength in numbers. Libraries are using consortia as their main tool for making deals with publishers and one another. Although publishers often sell their products to consortia members for less than single buyers would pay, the publishers are happy to make such deals. Consortia allow one company to corner the market for sales in competitive markets, offer a wide distribution of new products, and generally eliminate the hassle of making deals with many individual libraries. Big Consortia vs. Small Even as consortia have become an integral and growing part of the library business, some librarians and consortium managers say consortia are being forced to reconsider their role as they begin to compete more directly with one another in a time of tight budgets and a struggling economy. Big library consortia, they say, are facing increasing competition from smaller groups -- those with a handful of members compared with several hundred -- that are being created all the time. And they wonder how consortia will be able to keep up with the rising cost of journals and databases. "Right now it looks like a lot of competition," says Catherine C. Wilt, executive director of Palinet, a consortium that covers mid-Atlantic states. "And sometimes the competition is between us and our members." Library consortia have been around since the 1930s, but they blossomed in the 1970s, when libraries worked together to set up electronic catalogs. Today libraries form consortia to share storage space, provide computer and database maintenance, gain professional training, and obtain a number of other essentials. Consortia vary in size. Some are groups of a few small colleges in a rural valley, while others are huge buying cooperatives that include hundreds of institutions and stretch across whole regions of the country. The information revolution and the ever-rising cost of journals have dramatically increased libraries' reliance on consortia. One of the main roles these consortia have played is to make deals to get databases, journals, and other information at better prices. Consortia win deals by maintaining a critical mass of members that allows them to make bulk purchases, although even small consortia can negotiate good deals for their members. Many libraries belong to several consortia, buying different types of products through each. Libraries in a major university system, like the University of California, can form their own powerful consortium and belong to several consortia individually. Even small colleges often rely on several consortia. St. Ambrose gets catalog services, e-books, and reference databases through the Bibliographical Center for Research, a big consortium that has hundreds of members in 39 states, mainly in the West. St. Ambrose also buys databases and e-books through smaller groups, like the Iowa Private Academic Libraries consortium and Quad-LINK, a consortium of libraries along the Mississippi River between Iowa and Illinois. And it gets database contracts through a partnership with the Iowa State Library. In fact, so many consortia exist now that major established groups -- like Palinet -- are finding that they are competing with smaller and less bureaucratic consortia for the business of their members. "We have a lot of consortia-shopping going on," says Palinet's Ms. Wilt. "You can call Palinet and get a price, and you can call another consortium and get another price. I call it 'Let's make a deal du jour.'" Is Bigger Better? Observers disagree about what such competition means for the future of consortia. Ms. Wilt sees consortia getting bigger and bigger -- and she points to past mergers among some, like the Western Library Network and OCLC Online Computer Library Center, or her own Palinet and the Pittsburgh Regional Library Center. But bigger isn't necessarily better. "We're on the verge of seeing a lot of consolidation going on," she says. "It will limit competition. I don't think it's healthy." Bigger consortia may be able to negotiate lower prices for items. But bigger consortia can also move more slowly and need large staffs to manage the needs of the member libraries. Others see consortia getting both bigger and smaller. "It's easy to get lost in big consortia," says Steven J. Bell, the director of Philadelphia University's library, which is a member of Palinet as well as two other consortia. "If I have a rule, it's join as many consortia as you can that will benefit your library strategically, economically, socially, intellectually, culturally, so you get the most bang for your buck." Libraries pay membership fees to some consortia, but belonging to others is free. Increasingly, institutions maintain memberships in larger groups that offer good discounts on basic services while also joining smaller ones that serve specialized needs, such as groups for Jesuit colleges or Lutheran seminaries. Smaller groups can take advantage of deals that larger consortia wouldn't bother with, and they can move on deals quickly because there is less bureaucracy involved. Ilona Middleton, the library director at Medaille College, in Buffalo, N.Y., helped start a consortium for small libraries in her state in the mid-1990s. Not only did members save money in buying databases and journals, but they started working cooperatively. "It got us on the path of regionalism," she says. "Instead of developing collections to compete with each other, we started to think that this information should be a shared resource." Sharing Information One of the most important benefits was that the libraries began sharing information about the costs of goods and services. "Before, it was like buying from a used-car salesman," she says. "The vendors would charge whatever they could manipulate for a price, and nobody knew better because we didn't have any interaction." In Iowa, small private colleges got together to form a consortium, which includes St. Ambrose, Grinnell College, and Wartburg College, among others. Because the group is small, it is run by the member colleges' librarians in their spare time. They can find the deal-making process a challenge. Jill Gremmels, the library director at Wartburg, spent weeks setting up a yearlong contract for databases from Ebsco Information Services. Much of her time was spent negotiating prices, and then renegotiating when members dropped out of the deal and the basis for all her calculations changed. "It's a lot of work for a volunteer," she says. "It happened during May, when I'm usually teaching a class. This year I wasn't teaching it. Otherwise there would have been no way I would have time." The deal making and the compromises on what is good for the group can frustrate some of the members. Mr. Pollitz, at St. Ambrose, says that a recent deal started out with a dozen databases on the table, but by the time negotiations with the database company and all of the consortium members were through, St. Ambrose was only "interested in maybe one of those." In that deal, the consortium couldn't bring together enough institutions to bring down the price of the RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, a database he wanted. He found a better price on the MLA International Bibliography through a different consortium. Only the database PsychInfo was priced right through this deal, and so he bought it. To satisfy the needs of faculty members or the mission of the institution, a library might still buy a product even if it cannot get a deal through a consortium. Mr. Pollitz found, inexplicably and to his surprise, that he got the best price on the ATLA Religion Database by buying it on his own. Standard Business Such wheeling and dealing is largely invisible to faculty members at St. Ambrose. But when Mr. Pollitz managed to get a huge set of journals from the American Chemical Society through a statewide consortium, he says, it was "great PR" for the library among science professors. Although most companies see consortia as a standard part of library business, some -- like the journal archive JSTOR -- refuse to offer deals through them. Michael Spinella, the nonprofit company's executive director, says that the service's price has already been set at the lowest rate that will support JSTOR's mission of digitizing and archiving journals. "In our view, value should drive whether a resource is worth supporting, not the discount from what could be an arbitrary list price," Mr. Spinella writes in an e-mail interview. "Further, such approaches can be unfair, leading to fees that are not consistent across similar institutions, an outcome that we believe is inconsistent with JSTOR's collaborative mission and objectives." However, other companies have adapted to the consortium market readily, even enthusiastically. Ebsco Information Services, which is in the business of subscription management, has started managing consortium services and subscriptions for libraries. "There have been other vendors that have said that they don't need the consortia," says Ms. Wilt, from Palinet, "but they end up coming back because their products didn't get the sort of market penetration they wanted." Helen L. Wilbur, vice president for consortia sales and marketing at the Gale Group, a major publishing company, says that her company and her competitors see selling to consortia as an efficient way of selling services to many libraries at once. It is also a way of dominating a market in a particular region. For example, large aggregated periodical databases are often purchased by statewide consortia and offered to most of the libraries in the state, both academic and public. "If they are getting their primary periodical database supplied to them through a statewide contract, there is going to be a lot of incentive to cancel competitive products," she says. "You want to make sure it's your product that a state selects." Ms. Wilbur, who has worked as a librarian, says that consortia have created a more-competitive environment that has benefited libraries -- especially the smallest ones. "It really has brought so much more product to smaller institutions and enhanced the quality of access," she says. "When a state buys, you can go to the smallest library in the state and often get the same resources that you get in the best educational institution." Some question how long libraries will be able to use their leverage as a group, and how long they can maintain the savings they have negotiated through consortia. Tom Sanville, director of OhioLINK, a consortium that buys services for all the libraries in Ohio, says his group has suffered from cuts in state support this year, and he is unsure about how he will pay for services in the future. Libraries have been able to buy time and some advantages by banding together and going to publishers to strike a bargain, he says. But that hasn't solved the fundamental problem of rising prices. "Publishers and vendors helped create consortia by their pricing practices -- in part, because of an inability for libraries to cope" with inflation of journal and database costs, he says. "I can see as consortia mature, certainly in the group-purchasing area, you're going to end up hitting the wall again, only as a group," he says. "It's ultimately a stronger situation to be in. But it doesn't change the basic battle that you are fighting." ONE COLLEGE'S LIBRARIES, THREE CONSORTIA The Southwest Missouri State University libraries belong to three consortia, each of which provides different products and benefits to the university. The Missouri Bibliographic Information User System, or Mobius, includes more than 50 public and private academic libraries plus a major public-library system. They offer access to 17 million volumes via a common library catalog and direct user borrowing using electronic requests, with 48-hour delivery between libraries, annual conferences, staff-development opportunities, and negotiated deals for the following library databases at license discounts:
SOURCES: Southwest Missouri State University; Chronicle reporting
http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 50, Issue 7, Page A30
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education