Value of PALCI
COLLECTIONS AND
RESOURCE SHARING
HONORING THE DIVERSITY OF OUR COMMUNITY
INCUBATING BRIGHT
IDEAS
DEMONSTRATED
VALUE
Strength in Numbers: 2022 Highlights
PALCI Benefits
PALCI runs EZBorrow, our consortial interlibrary loan technology platform that includes the PALCI Shared Index, an aggregation of PALCI library holdings.
Leveraging the collections of more than 50 institutions, your patrons, faculty, staff, and students gain the ability to search and access a world-class aggregated collection with more than 34 million holdings, combining the resources of PALCI’s diverse libraries with interlibrary loan borrowing privileges for all requestable materials within the consortium.
PALCI libraries share a commitment to fast turnaround service to patrons, making it quick and easy for patrons to locate the print items they need.
Libraries are empowered to work together in PALCI to manage their collections. Our Retrospective Collections Working Group is defining a set of goals for a “healthy resource sharing ecosystem” that will empower libraries to make data informed decisions as libraries weed their collections or acquire new materials.
EZBorrow and access to the PALCI Shared Index is included with your PALCI membership. Today, EZBorrow serves 550,000 students and faculty with 3-4 day delivery of books.
EZBorrow saves staff time. By connecting your library to our unmediated borrowing platform (ReShare), EZBorrow determines which libraries own a copy of an item being requested, and load balances the incoming requests in order to distribute them an equitable fashion across a network of more than 50 supplying institutions.
EZBorrow is
- A well-known library service brand among faculty and students
- Available at a low cost, saving staff time with each transaction.
- Serving 4 states
- 150,000 books delivered annually
Our approach to collective acquisitions prioritizes and leverages the diversity of institutions present within the consortium for greater effect and scale. Our staff are expert negotiators, experienced in designing and implementing consortial licensing and purchase arrangements that cut costs, expand access, and build new approaches to collective collections. While we do offer a variety of opt-in discount programs, we rarely act like a traditional “buying club,” and instead, we choose to focus on opportunities that deliver a high return on investment with value that’s felt widely across the consortium.
Highlights include:
Electronic purchasing and licensing with innovative terms and business models, such as content portability (ability to host content on more than one platform), full eBook ILL rights, financial hardship clauses, and more.
Most offerings are made available to libraries at-cost as part of your annual PALCI partnership dues — your dues provide you with access to our staff’s expertise and unique PALCI offerings that are developed in response to member needs. In all cases, we offer transparency in the development of our cost-share models, and creative approaches to funding collective acquisitions.
We employ a strategy that leverages libraries’ existing investments in content and collections in order to expand access and drive down costs per institution.
Examples of recent deals include:
- Frontlist and backlist ownership of all Oxford University Press content on the OSO Platform
- Frontlist and backlist ownership of Sage Knowledge content
- Negotiated discounts on subscription programs with major publishers, representing extremely low annual increase percentages, and expanded content access and ownership
- PALCI-wide ProQuest Ebook Central subscription collection and AVON streaming video
- PALCI-wide ownership of Adam Matthew Digital’s 2018 and all backlist collections
- JSTOR’s EBA eBooks model
- And much, much more!
PALCI is highly responsive to the needs of its members. Our staff prioritizes PALCI offerings by analyzing the needs of its members with the PALCI Collections Advisory Council and working groups, and then working directly with publishers and content service providers to take creative approaches. Each year, we ask our collections contacts at each library to complete a survey. PALCI staff develop programs based on these responses and stated priorities.
In addition, PALCI negotiates deals on a variety of eResource renewals and other services. See What We Do for more information.
PALCI is transforming the future for academic libraries, providing the collaboration spaces for sharing the risk associated with strategic innovation, always with an eye toward investment in strategic open, community-owned library infrastructure. PALCI is regularly awarded grant funds to support our innovative approaches and in the past year, the organization received more than $500,000 in grants to support community efforts and technology-based projects.
- PALCI is actively engaged in the development of practical, widely utilized, scalable solutions, including
- ReShare open source resource sharing system
- Hyku for Consortia Repository Service
- CC-PLUS (Consortia Collaborating on a Platform for Library Usage Statistics)
- PALCI is well-known in the consortium community as a leader in advocating for library solutions, including recent leadership of several national-level groups on Controlled Digital Lending.
PALCI is well-known on a regional, national and international level for its work in leading and advocating for library solutions that scale.
Recent examples includes PALCI staff working on leading national-level conversations on Controlled Digital Lending and other advocacy efforts to improve service from library vendors.
Leadership occurs on multiple levels within PALCI, including:
- Consortium staff – PALCI’s staff are experts in what they do, bringing deep collaboration experience to areas including license negotiation and collective acquisitions, collection management, strategic innovation, resource sharing, project management, and technology expertise.
- PALCI Board of Directors – The PALCI Board of Directors is a deeply engaged group of PALCI voting representatives who set the vision for the organization.
- PALCI Libraries – The librarians and staff at PALCI libraries often lead from within, bringing their ideas, experience, unique talents, and expertise to bear on the consortium overall in shared initiatives through committees, working groups and task forces. Members regularly meet through monthly interest group meetings and forums.
- External partnerships – PALCI works in development of partnerships with other communities to leverage the strengths of the communities in which we participate, including NISO, ReShare, the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC), partnership with the PALNI consortium on the Hyku for Consortia project, and more.
PALCI’s diverse community is perhaps its greatest strength.
Through PALCI membership, your library’s staff will benefit by actively engaging with the staff of many other libraries through PALCI governance, events, and gatherings.
PALCI’s partnering libraries share their knowledge, expertise and experiences together through monthly calls and interest groups, as well as through active engagement in PALCI’s various governance structures. PALCI hosts monthly web-based calls for deans and directors, resource sharing groups, the collections communities and committees and task forces. We hold regular events that bring in well-known speakers, and generate ideas in events like our Collections Forums.
In addition, PALCI incubated our region’s Affordable Learning PA program – funded in part by LSTA, which now is home to a community of practice around Open Educational Resources and affordable learning initiatives.
In 2021, PALCI developed a consortium-wide agreement with NISO – the National Information Standards Organization. As a member of PALCI, all PALCI members now also receive NISO Library Standards Alliance benefits.
