NEWS RELEASE: King’s College Joins Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration and Innovation (PALCI)

DREXEL HILL, PA, August 3, 2022 — Effective July 1, the Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration and Innovation (PALCI) welcomed King’s College, a Catholic liberal arts college located in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to the consortium’s membership of 71 academic and research libraries.

By joining, King’s students and faculty will gain access to PALCI’s well-known EZBorrow resource sharing service, which allows PALCI libraries to efficiently share their physical collections. In addition, the King’s College Library community will benefit from extensive savings and access to group-purchased online library collections through PALCI’s strategic collaborative initiatives.

“It was a simple decision to join PALCI,” according to David Schappert, Director of the Library at King’s. “This is the third school that I’ve brought into PALCI as a library director, and there isn’t anything else I’ve done anywhere with as immediate and sustaining positive impact. PALCI will enable us to take advantage of economies of scale to purchase materials that otherwise would be inaccessible to us, and also to provide the infrastructure to share resources more efficiently.”

Formerly known as the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc., PALCI has an expanded membership across the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and West Virginia. Its members include small, private liberal arts colleges and very large public and private institutions working together to harness the power and scale of this large and diverse partnership. Member library staff participate in consortium-facilitated collaborations, events, and programs aimed at community building and knowledge and expertise sharing.

“The benefits of PALCI go beyond providing resources to our campus community. It is an opportunity to interact with our colleagues at a wide range of institutions and to contribute in our small way to an exemplary library partnership,” added Schappert.

“We often say that the diversity of our member institutions is one of our greatest assets. Small and large institutions find shared value in working together at-scale to achieve incredible results. Last year alone, PALCI members collaborated to collectively save more than 90% off list prices for major packages purchased for all PALCI members,” shared Jill Morris, PALCI Executive Director. “We are simply delighted to have David back among PALCI’s membership, and to welcome his team at King’s.”

To explore how PALCI supports academic and research libraries in Pennsylvania and the surrounding geographic region, visit https://palci.org/membership.

About King’s College
King’s College is a Catholic institution of higher education animated and guided by the Congregation of Holy Cross. King’s pursues excellence in teaching, learning, and scholarship through a rigorous core curriculum, major programs across the liberal arts and sciences, nationally accredited professional programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and personal attention to student formation in a nurturing community. To learn more about King’s College, please visit https://www.kings.edu.

About PALCI
PALCI is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership organization, which originated in 1996 as the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc., a grassroots federation of 35 academic libraries in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Known today as the Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration and Innovation, the PALCI membership now consists of more than 70 academic and research libraries in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and West Virginia. PALCI’s mission is to enable cost-effective and sustainable access to information resources and services for academic libraries in Pennsylvania and surrounding states. PALCI is well known for its highly-regarded EZBorrow consortial ILL service. PALCI members partner to serve over 800,000 students, faculty, and staff, with a particular focus on collaborative collections programs, resource sharing services, and innovative technology projects and approaches to library services. For more information contact jill@palci.org or visit palci.org.