California's three public higher education systems (University of California, California State University, the California Community College System) enroll nearly 3 million undergraduate students and employ almost 100 thousand faculty. In 2012, the California State Legislature directed the three systems to create an online library of open…

Although spiraling costs and reduced budgets require that small academic libraries form clusters to share resources and services, consortia and library networks so far have taken only tentative or shallow steps in this direction. Real and meaningful steps can and must be taken to develop joint acquisition policies, effective and timely…

The state of Pennsylvania has embarked on a statewide initiative for distance education called the Center for Agile Pennsylvania Education (CAPE) consisting of community colleges and colleges and universities across the state; Duquesne University has joined this state-wide consortium in which members are encouraged to provide courses in areas of…

Drawing on a current study, funded by the British Library Research and Innovation Centre, the context of higher education libraries is discussed, including funding and costs and recent major official reports on education and libraries. Future trends and imperatives are outlined. Models of library purchasing consortia are presented. The operation…

The continuing problem of the high cost of accessing scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature haunts both developed and developing economies. Maintaining access to significant research and scholarship at a time when both the volume and price of information have increased nearly three-fold in the last decade requires fresh strategies and…

This paper reports on a consortial attempt to overcome the high costs of scholarly journals and to study the roots of the cost problem. A multi-discipline study of the impact of electronic publishing on the pricing of scholarly periodicals is discussed. A brief overview of the pricing issue comparing print and electronic publishing is followed by…

The successes and failures of a small private college in internationalizing its business curriculum are discussed. The college's condition of severely constrained resources is outlined, and the college's program development approach of sharing resources with other institutions is described. A consortium of local institutions was created to…

Presents an economic model to analyze the cost efficiency of access to journal articles via three alternatives: journal subscriptions, consortium membership, and commercial document delivery. Results show cost efficiency is based on the value of future journal use, costs of delivery and subscriptions, and the value of time to patrons. (Author/LRW)