From The Library Director

In the last issue of the UAMS Library News, I wrote about the rapid changes in scholarly publishing as more online resources become available, about the rapid rise in the cost of online resources, and about the budget situation in which the Library finds itself. In this article, I will review some of the efforts made by the Library to leverage its limited resources by cooperating in purchasing and sharing agreements with other institutions.

SCAMeL (South Central Academic Medical Libraries) is a consortium of the fourteen academic health sciences libraries in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. This consortium has been in existence for twenty years and provides several benefits to the UAMS Library. The SCAMeL libraries do not charge each other for interlibrary loans, which saves a tremendous amount of money since the vast majority of the interlibrary loans requested by the Library are filled by SCAMeL libraries. Libraries in other regions of the country charge varying loan fees averaging $10-12 per article. SCAMeL also participates in several group purchases of online resources, such as STAT!Ref and the Blackwell, American Psychiatric Association, and Nature journals. Until last year, SCAMeL had a cost-sharing consortial agreement to purchase the 167 Academic Press (AP) journals, but when Reed Elsevier purchased AP it eliminated consortial purchasing arrangements. Because of this elimination, the Library purchased the 20 most highly used AP titles, and paid the same $50,000 total for those 20 that it originally paid for all 167 titles. This illustrates the benefit of consortial purchasing.

• From the Library Director
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