Library Consortia = Increased Buying Power
Hardin Library currently provides access to over 2200 biomedical journals. The dramatic increase in our electronic holdings over the past three years would not have been possible without the participation of the University of Iowa Libraries in several library consortia. Library consortia boost the purchasing power of member institutions by working with publishers to gain group discounts for e-access and/or increasing the number of titles available to consortia members.
The University Libraries participates in a number of consortia, the two major ones being the Committee for Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the Interinstitutional Collection Management Committee (ICMC). The CIC consortia includes the Big Ten universities plus the University of Chicago and the ICMC consortia includes Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa. From May 2002 to October 2002, the University of Iowa Libraries saved $98,000 as a result of consortial membership. Access to the e-journals of Elsevier Science Direct, John Wiley, Wolters Kluwer, Blackwell, and Nature Publishers have all been negotiated through these two consortia.
New England Journal of Medicine in PDF on Selected Workstations
Full-text PDF access to the New England Journal of Medicine will soon be available on seven selected workstations at the Hardin Library, all near the Information Desk. The publisher of NEJM does not currently offer an institutional site license, meaning we can only provide access through a set number of specified computers. We recognize that true electronic access includes access to all UI users from any workstation on or off campus and like other health sciences libraries, we have been actively lobbying the publisher for institutional site licensing.
