Library Consortia: Issues and Challenges with Special Reference to INDEST-AICTE Consortium

Due to ever increasing prices of journals, publishers and vendor dominated market, change in demand of the users, lack of competition, and for various other reasons, no library is in the position to fulfil all the demands of the users. This has given the concept of library resource sharing. This has led to the establishment of many technical and specific subject related consortium approaches in pursuit of optimizing the libraries’ resource base while achieving substantial savings through combined and coordinated bargains with publishers. Consortium based library subscriptions to e-journals and electronic full-text databases are picking up good momentum in India. INDEST-AICTE consortium, CSIR consortium, IIM consortium, IBFLIBNET’s UGC-INFONET consortium, DRDO consortium etc. are successful ones to name a few. At the same time Library Consortia are not free from problems. There are various issues relating to consortia like uninterrupted online access, perpetual access to back issues, pricing, licensing, copyright and archival solutions etc. These need to be strategically tackled and well addressed to get the best out of the consortia. This paper discusses the types, needs, models and advantages of consortia subscriptions in general. It also discusses the challenges and issues faced by library consortia with special reference to INDESTAICTE consortium.