Building a Virtual National Serials Collection Using the MEADS System

Abstract

University libraries in Australia are now facing a crisis of unimaginable proportion, and their ability to supply the scholarly information required to support teaching and research has been seriously impaired by the inexorable annual rise in the cost of serials, and by falls in the value of the Australian dollar. While Australian universities collectively spent $86.5 million on serials in 1996 and acquired some 290,426 serial titles, the lack of cooperation and rationalisation has meant that considerable duplication exists. This paper argues that contrary to the current belief that any collecting agreement based on the Distributed National Collection concept can only be achieved with additional funding from the Commonwealth Government, the Australian university system can easily fund the creation of a great scholarly collection of serials for use by the nation merely by increasing the average expenditure on libraries from 5.1% to 5.3% of total university expenditure.Once the national collection has been built, virtual access can be provided using a model of access and document delivery called MEADS (Monash Electronic Access and Delivery of Serials). This is d Web-based document delivery system that provides a browsable database of the contents pages of the relevant serials which authorised users can access, and use to send request for the supply of journal articles. The contents pages are linked electronically to participating consortium member libraries which can supply the articles automatically to the user within an agreed turnaround time. The system has many advantages in that it is targeted, cost effective, and particularly suitable for a multi-campus university environment. There are, however, many issues that need to be resolved before a national MEADS system can be implemented successfully. They include the management of the national collection, decisions regarding whether the collection should be distributed or housed in one central location, the funding of the infrastructure and labour costs and so on.