Consortium building and licensing by university libraries in the Netherlands

Abstract

There are 13 university libraries in the Netherlands. Together with the Royal Library in The Hague and the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences in Amsterdam they form an association, the Association UKB. The UKB is a voluntary association with no formal legal basis. It is a platform for discussing and developing joint policy in the area of scientific information provision and services in the Netherlands. Her main interests include designing a national information infrastructure, organising loans between libraries, developing digital information services, granting consortium-related licenses, agreeing on pricing policies with respect to publishers, co-ordinating collection development and shared cataloguing and indexing. The UKB co-operates closely with PICA, a Dutch corporation for library automation and information, which was founded by a number of Dutch libraries and is now merged with OCLC. Especially in the field of licensing, the UKB has taken a number of important actions over the last few years: For example, it was on the UKB’s initiative that various licensing deals with information providers were concluded. This paper deals with the results achieved so far and reviews some of the experienced successes and problems.