Migrating from Informal to Formal Consortium - ”COSTLI” issues

Abstract

There are many models of library consortia which came into existence due to various reasons and compulsions. FORSA (Forum for Resource Sharing in Astronomy) is an informal consortium borne from institutional linkages of academic institutions specializing in Astronomy in India, which is a library professionals initiated cooperative venture.. Though this consortium was formed mainly for inter-lending activities and bibliographic access, it has matured over the years to adopt the consortium approach on cooperative acquisitions, due to increased requirements. A rationale approach from the Department of Science and Technology (DST) of Government of India triggered the union of DST libraries and CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research) libraries to cooperate to provide additional electronic resources to their users. DST and CSIR are two different scientific departments with in the Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India with 26 institutes under DST and 39 laboratories under CSIR. Out of these 26 institutes of DST, five aremembers of FORSA consortium. Recently DST joined hands with CSIR in forming the consortium called as ’COSTLI’, Consortium Of Science and Technology Libraries. All the member organizations of DST will be accessing the additional electronic resources which are already available to CSIR member libraries through this consortium. COSTLI will be formally governed with central funding. The various issues in the process of migrating from an informal to a formal consortium are discussed in this paper. As this initiative is very new, the concept and the idea of migration needs to be debated.