Cost sharing will become imperative, they say, as publishers produce more electronic materials and make them available in full-text formats, which generally are more expensive than collections of citations and abstracts and place heavier burdens on library computer systems. Consortia are not a new idea among libraries, which have worked together for decades to coordinate interlibrary-lending procedures and to tie together the electronic catalogues of neighboring institutions. The new wrinkle, librarians say, is the effort to coordinate electronic acquisitions in ways usually not done with books and journals. Those involved say it is easier to cooperate on the purchase of electronic materials because they are available to all consortium members simultaneously. Efforts to promote the sharing of paper materials have always been hindered by the fact that librarians had to trust their counterparts at other institutions to deliver a book or journal promptly.
Officials there say resource sharing offers benefits for large and small colleges.
Richard A. Skinner, president of Clayton State College, says buying many popular data bases centrally lets larger libraries focus their acquisition budgets on specialized resources, while smaller institutions, such as his, get access to data they could not afford otherwise. All of the electronic resources that the group has licensed are loaded on computers at the University of Georgia and Georgia State that are accessible through Peachnet, a network linking state colleges. The 13 institutions that make up the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a Midwestern group of research universities, are sharing the technical burden by agreeing to load one data base on each campus and to make its contents available to each other through the Internet. In Virginia, the six doctorate-granting universities in the VIVA group run all of the shared data bases on their computers. Charlene S. Hurt, chairwoman of VIVA 's steering committee and director of libraries at George Mason University, says the Internet's World-Wide Web gave a big boost to consortia because of its ability to link campuses regardless of their computer systems.