ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 71 | October 2004
How to Do More
with Less
The CASL Experience
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Karen
Vinoles trials the new EBSCO service |
Libraries often struggle to provide information to increasingly demanding users. The user usually wants the most recent article on their chosen topic, in full text, and right away. The difficulty doesn’t lie in a lack of available material (we’ve all experienced the information glut in some form or another), rather it’s the relevance, accuracy and accessibility of what is available that is the issue. What’s more, the theme of budgetary constraints and reduced staffing levels is familiar to all libraries. So what is the solution? Work together to achieve greater resources at the best price, a development achieved by the Council of Australian State Libraries (CASL) Consortium.
The CASL Consortium is a group of Australian state, territory and national libraries formed for the purpose of acquiring access to commercial electronic information resources. Its aim is to simplify licensing arrangements, improve cost benefits for member libraries, and to explore opportunities for making electronic product more widely available to Australians, regardless of where they live.
The group members have agreed to come together and pool their resources and buying power. In doing so, they have achieved some great things. As a consortium, they provide vendors with a single point of contact, so negotiations are simpler. The management of each library is relieved from most of the contract negotiations, freeing it to concentrate on other aspects of their library’s role, with the result that the end user has more resources to choose from.
The most recent example of the success of the CASL Consortium is the purchase of the MasterFILE Premier Package, produced by EBSCO Publishing. This online collection of five databases provides access to over 6 650 full-text titles, 280 newspapers and newswires, 700 reference books, 85 000 biographies, 1200 country reports, 2600 industry reports and yearbooks, 107 000 images, maps and flags and much more. After an initial evaluation period, each of the consortium members subscribed to the package, and in negotiating with EBSCO as a group, arranged a significantly discounted subscription—more database for less money. Australians will benefit by having access to the package, while their library now has a few more coins in the purse to spend on other acquisitions. Much to the relief of the library management, the contract negotiations were handled by the CASL convenor.
The consortium is a relatively young group (three-and-a-half years old) but
already it has proved its value to the state and public libraries and the National
Library of Australia. The major achievement of the consortium—providing access
to quality Australian full-text electronic resources—has enabled many people
across the country to access these resources for study and research purposes
and for general information enquiries.
—David Ong, Kinetica Customer Services
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