LIBRARY EXPENDITURES HAVE INCREASED faster than inflation over the last six years. Ironically, libraries are losing ground economically in several key areas. How can this be? Claims on the library dollarnot only unit prices but the full spectrum of library budgetary demands-are growing even faster than the library budget. Not only have the prices of monographs and serials increased, but journal...

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 sp...

HISTORICALLY, FORMED consortia for the primary purpose ACMEMlC LIBRNES of sharing printed materials. Recently, academic libraries are forming consortia to provide common access to electronic resources across the Internet, and they are forming these consortia on a statewide basis. This article describes five of these newer statewide efforts: GALILEO in Georgia, the Louisiana Library Network, Ohi...

AELSTRACT USINGNETWORKED INFORMATION RESOURCES to communicate the results of scholarship has great potential value for academic libraries. This development, here called “academic information services,” will require collaboration among libraries, scholars, computing centers, and university presses. Three barriers to collaboration are discussed: (1) clashes of organizational cultures, (2) persona...

Locating usable spatial data is essential for the application and use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). GIS data collection development constitutes a core element of GIS services within academic libraries. Managers of geospatial resources require a fundamental understanding of the nature and use of GIS data. In the creation of a GIS collection development policy, library professionals sh...

The Standards Committee of the Veterinary Medical Libraries Section was appointed in May 2000 and charged to create standards for the ideal academic veterinary medical library, written from the perspective of veterinary medical librarians. The resulting Standards for the Academic Veterinary Medical Library were approved by members of the Veterinary Medical Libraries Section during MLA '03 in Sa...

On September 3, 2003, the Medical Library Association adopted a policy statement on the role of expert searching in health sciences libraries. The policy highlighted the need for more thorough literature searching following the unfortunate death of a healthy research volunteer in a clinical trial that might have been prevented by a more complete literature review [1–3]. In light of this policy,...