Rethinking bibliographic utilities for library consortia

摘要

A bibliographic utility is a necessary prerequisite for effective library consortia, a paradigm shift from the concept of individual ownership to a collective access of distributed network resources. The continuous advocacy for resource sharing and purchasing partnerships among libraries to improve access to resources calls for consortia initiatives. A consortium could be described as a group of organisations who come together to fulfill a combined objective that usefully requires cooperation and sharing of resources and needs to have a clear mutual goal to ensure their success. According to Babarinde and Onifade (2019), the concept of a library consortium developed as a result of the aspirations of libraries to reach out to more users and to satisfy their information needs from time to time. The decrease in budget allocation for libraries and the rising prices of library resources also necessitated the formation of library consortia.