Well it is renewal time and I wanted to share a big money saver. We talked with other medical librarians in our area. Ok that sounds like a real no brainer, but it amazes me that there are so many things that we take for granted that other libraries have no clue about and vice versa.

In the past we have had horrible problems getting copies of Spine's epages. These little gems are only available online and require an institutional account. Lippincott Williams and Wilkins do not offer a way for institutional print subscribers to get epages with a simple user name and password. Nope, you must have institutional access through Ovid, who happens to be within the same parent company as LWW (very incestuous I know.) Anyway, we were having problems getting the epages because we could not afford an institutional account to Spine through Ovid. We would try and get the epage article via Interlibrary Loan but many times we would get rejected. Many libraries are wary of ILL-ing epage articles because ejournal providers have not settled on a standard by which epages can be ILL-ed. Some ejournal proveders say they can while other say they can't leaving an nice ambiguous quagmire for libraries to deal with in their ILL lives.

Anyway there was one wonderful library who would ILL the epages to Spine and our ILL librarian finally asked them how they were able to get the article. The librarian told us that their Ovid rep had told them about a consortia that gave them access to 140 LWW titles. She said there was another consortia that offers access to their LWW Total Access collection. Now here comes the kicker, their Ovid rep is our Ovid rep. As it turns out our Ovid rep (also their Ovid rep) never mentioned these lovely consortias, even after we asked him about getting online access to Spine.

Now you might say, "Well you already said you couldn't afford online access to Spine, what makes you think you can afford consortia access to 140 LWW titles or to their Total Access collection." I would say that answer holds water for normal people but not for vendor reps, they (our Ovid rep included) always try to sell you something bigger and better that costs more money. Well once we found out that our rep "forgot" to tell us about the consortias we looked more closesly at our Ovid electronic collections. It turns out that already had electronic access to almost every journal in their Core collections with a few exceptions. We were paying approximately the cost of a 2005 Toyota Land Rover plus a good chunck extra for access to the Core collections. The Total Access consortia price came in for less than a Honda CRV! Obviously a huge savings. We were able to take the Land Rover savings and fill in journal titles that we lost (and had no alternative access) from our elimination of the Core Collection.

To make a long story short.... We were able to take a 2005 Toyota Land Cruiser + change budget that bought full text access to approximately 80 journals on Ovid and turn it around to buy 200+ electronic journals and have some money left over. What did we actually do with that left over money!? We added to our collection!!! This is all because we talked to another librarian. Yippie!

So talk, email, send smoke signals, whatever works, just communicate with each other. There are a lot of other things librarians can do. Create a wish pool among your consortia. Get you consortia together and create a database of all the products you are currently buying as an individual library. List the price and and any specialties. That way your consortia can operate from a position of knowledge and power to acquire needed resources. There are consortias already doing, so you go do it too.