[Lyrarl] ARL offers extended throughout North America

[Celeste Feather]

I want to bring you up to date on some activities that are part of the ARL Licensing Initiative that may not be obvious or clear to you yet. I know that many of you have seen announcements from multiple consortia for the content that is being offered through the ARL Licensing Initiative, specifically Harvard, MUSE, and UPSO. A key part of the Initiative is stated in the original RFP document that ARL issued:

"ARL intends that any agreement will be open to non-ARL members of established consortia in which ARL members are participants. In this spirit, the agent will be free to offer the same terms to non-ARL members and to coordinate with those consortia in a manner beneficial to ARL members and other parties."

In keeping with this intent, I have been working closely with other consortia throughout the US and Canada that can extend the reach of these special offers beyond LYRASIS and ARL member libraries. We want to leave no one behind. That's why you are seeing notices from many directions about these offers. To date, the following consortia have expressed a desire to be part of this inter-consortial coalition to help promote awareness of the ARL-supported offers. Due to internal schedules and workload, the offer announcements are not all appearing simultaneously.

AMIGOS
Consortia Canada
Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL)
Conférence des recteurs et des principaux des universités du Québec (CREPUQ)
LYRASIS
Midwest Collaborative for Library Services (MCLS)
Minitex
OhioLINK
Orbis-Cascade
Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC)
Wisconsin Library Services (WiLS)

Key to this inter-consortial collaboration for the Harvard/De Gruyter and Oxford UPSO offers is the fact that all participating libraries are counted towards the thresholds needed to obtain deeper discounts for all. Thus, the benefits of coordinated simultaneous action are available to thousands of North American libraries if they choose to participate.

One further point of clarification is that the ARL/LYRASIS negotiated group licenses will only cover those libraries that order through the LYRASIS administrative channel. We are obligated by these group licenses to obtain agreement to abide by the terms from libraries at the point of order. Although an occasional amendment to satisfy local institutional requirements is necessary, for the most part this central license effort has brought a lot of badly-needed efficiency to the licensing process. Also, as we seek to glean information from usage statistics that will help us in future negotiations, LYRASIS as ARL's agent will only be able to access usage data from those libraries that are covered under the terms of the ARL group license.

I'm sure we're all sending a lot of positive thoughts towards our colleagues in the northeast over the next day or two as they weather yet another serious storm! Here's hoping for a safe weekend for all.

Celeste

Celeste Feather
Licensing Program Account Manager
LYRASIS
celeste.feather at lyrasis.org<mailto:celeste.feather at lyrasis.org>
800-999-8558 ext. 2954 (Toll-free)
678-235-2954 (Direct)
404-550-6459 (Cell)
celeste.feather (Skype)

www.lyrasis.org<http://www.lyrasis.org/>

LYRASIS: Advancing Libraries Together.

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