Academic library consortia in contemporary South Africa

Academic library consortia in South Africa are indeed beasts whose time has come at last, although whether they constitute a second coming for our profession or our end-users remains to be seen. They can probably be described as a group of diverse entities, rough and as-yet unsure of their destination. In this descriptive text, we attempt to outline, for a mainly North American audience, the specifics which distinguish the developing consortia in a newly democratic and newly globalised South Africa from those in other more economically advantaged parts of the world. It remains to be seen whether the center will in fact hold. Letting go reluctantly of this literary conceit, for the time being at least, we describe the all-important social and political background in which our institutions must operate, moving on to an analysis of the impulse to cooperate and the obstacles that have emerged to stifle that impulse. In our conclusion we risk some predictions about where academic library consortia may be headed in our part of the world. The socio-political context It is impossible to discuss academic library consortia – or any other subjects – in the new South Africa without locating them in the context of the dramatic changes which are still, five years after the first democratic elections and a day before the second, filling our horizons to the exclusion of virtually all other preoccupations. But South Africa’s changes, pace Time magazine, have always been and remain to this day, the subject of intense struggle, the outcomes of which cannot be teleologically predicted. South Africa’s economic and social history has produced a divided and confused country. In some respects, the country has the characteristics of the First World, with a highly literate subset of the population making use of a comprehensive system of telecommunications, information and consumer services. But it also has a large number of unlettered people, with rates of literacy varying between 52 per cent in metropolitan areas to 28 per cent in rural areas. The difference in literacy levels across the so-called population or race groups is also large[1]. Urban areas have a higher percentage of highschool graduates, but, again, the spread across population groups is very marked. Interim results from the first post-apartheid census, conducted in 1996, showed that there are 37.9 million people living in South Africa. The country is formally classified as an upper-middle income country, but a different reality is revealed in the 1996 World Competitiveness Report, which placed South Africa Library Consortium Management: An International Journal, Vol. 1 No. 1/2, 1999, pp. 23-32. © MCB University Press, 1466-2760