ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Southwest Academic Library Consortium

The Spring of 1967 gave birth to another cooperative venture among institutions of higher education in the Southwest. Some twenty academic libraries in New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas entered into a Consortium. The following statements were accepted at the first two meetings, March 28, 1967 in Albuquerque and October 10, 1967 in Portales, New Mexico.

1. Each institution will prepare a list of serial holdings, giving title and volumes held, and will send this list to all libraries in the combination.

2. A program of mutually exclusive serial purchase will be established, participation to be voluntary.

3. The institutions will explore the possibilities of specializing in the acquisition of serials by subject fields.

4. Upon the request of the librarian in any institution in the combination, a library will Xerox the contents pages of designated serials and will mail to the requesting library. A fee of ten cents will be charged for each page. Faculty members receiving contents pages may check articles they want their library to request via interlibrary loan.

5. A simple tally record of interlibrary loan transactions will be maintained by each institution. An annual exchange of records and billing, if so desired, at ten cents per page was agreed upon.

The annual year will be the Gregorian calendar year. Teletype messages will also be accepted in addition to regular interlibrary loan forms and checked contents page copies as request forms.

6. Several institutions already have TWX installations and others are anticipating installations. ALL institutions in the Consortium were asked to explore the possibility of teletype. If library use alone could not justify the expense a combined effort of the entire institution was urged.

Federal Grants under Type C of the Higher Education Act based on the Consortium were received by five libraries for a total of $152,- 200.00.

For the present, formal membership in the

Consortium will be limited to academic insti-tutions of higher education. The Consortium will have two meetings each year, one in the Fall and one in the Spring. The place will change from one institution to another with the specific location of the next meeting to be decided at a regular meeting of the Consortium. The chairman for each meeting will be the head librarian of the institution following alphabetically on a continuous rotating basis beginning with Panhandle State College.

The third meeting of the Southwest Academic Library Consortium was scheduled at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico, March 15. Don Richardson, librarian at Panhandle State College, will act as chairman for the Spring meeting.