The latest developments in the consortia world, brought to you by our CDO team.
e-ShodhSindhu – the new player on the Indian consortia market
Following the recommendation of an expert commission the Indian Union Government Ministry of Human Resource Development merged in late 2015 its three separate licensing programmes for higher education libraries (INDEST-AICTE, UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium, and NLIST) into one single consortium: e-ShodhSindhu. The new consortium is managed by the INFLIBNET centre, which used to manage UGC-INFONET DLC and NSLIST. Whereas INDEST-AICTE and UGC-INFONET DLC have been dissolved, NLIST now operates as a specialist licensing program of e-ShodhSindhu and provides more than 4500 colleges across India with access to electronic information resources.
Experts see in the emergence of e-ShodhSindhu an important step towards a national consortium, which potentially could unify in the future the various consortia currently operating in the Indian market. We have updated our database according to these recent changes and will continue to monitor developments in India.
Nationwide licensing initiative launched in Egypt
In January 2016 the Egyptian Government launched the Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB), a state-funded nationwide licensing program, which provides anyone with an Egyptian IP address with free access to a digital library of Arabic and English information resources.
The project aims to transform the country into a knowledge society and to ensure that all residents, no matter of what social and economic background, can access the information resources necessary for their education and research. With more than 50% of Egypt’s 90 million citizens using the internet, EKB is believed to be the biggest national licensing programme worldwide. Licences have been agreed so far with Cambridge University Press, Emerald Group Publishing, IET, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press and Springer SBM.
DRAA membership continues to grow
Since its establishment in 1998 the Digital Resource Acquisition Alliance of Chinese Academic Libraries (DRAA) has grown rapidly and is now with more than 600 members China’s largest and most important academic library consortium.
Over the last year almost 20 institutions joined as new members, for example: the Xi’an Medical University, the Henan Vocational College of Water Conservancy and Environment, the Shanghai Civil Aviation College, the Zhejiang Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, and the South China Business College of the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies.
New consortia added to CDO
Our recent additions include:
- Egypt, Egyptian Knowledge Bank
- India, e-ShodhSindhu: Consortium for Higher Education Electronic Resources
- Paraguay, Centro de Información Científica del Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología
- United Arab Emirates, eFADA (Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in United Arab Emirates)
As always, please feel free to voice your tips and suggestions about future CDO developments. You can email us at info@ringgold.com, or you can reach us via our feedback form. It provides you with a direct link to our team, so that you can raise log in issues, request checks on consortia you are intending to contact, or inform us about consortia missing from our directory.
You can also find us on Skype at ‘ringgoldinc’. And keep an eye on our Twitter feed twitter.com/ringgoldinc, where we announce new consortia additions.
Moritz Schick, CDO Editor.