Licensing and Shared Collections:
Lower Costs, More Access

TABLE 1: TRLN-Negotiated Inflation Costs Versus Average Inflation Rates

TABLE 2: TRLN Document Delivery Data from 2001-2005

TABLE 3: Joint Licensing - Enhanced Access at Lower Costs

TABLE 1: TRLN-Negotiated Inflation Costs Versus Average Inflation Rates*

TRLN cooperatively licenses more than $4.5 million of scholarly content - constituting 13% of its member institutions' combined collections budgets. Agreements with twelve vendors and publishers provide more than 1,650 electronic journals and seven databases, including high demand resources such as ISI's Web of Knowledge and CAS's SciFinder Scholar.

The electronic journals and databases licensed through TRLN cost each institution approximately $1.5 million (with the exception of NCCU, whose costs are approximately $100,000). Licensed individually, the same content would cost each TRLN member $3.2 million, or more than $10 million for the four institutions combined.

Collective bargaining also results in significantly lower inflation rates for scholarly information, compared with market norms. These lower rates result in more than $200,000 in savings annually, or over $1 million cumulatively since 2001. The result of collaborative licensing is vastly expanded content for the TRLN community for far less money.

*Average inflation rate for scholarly information provided by Library Journal's annual Periodical Price Survey.

TABLE 2: TRLN Document Delivery Data from 2001-2005

Accessing the Combined Collections

Expedited document delivery and direct borrowing privileges enable TRLN patrons to access more than 14 million volumes and 125,000 journal subscriptions held by the four member institutions.

In the 2004/2005 academic year, TRLN users received 25,662 articles through expedited document delivery and directly borrowed more than 23,000 books.

• The average document delivered within TRLN costs $2 (excluding staff and equipment costs) versus $12 for requests filled outside of TRLN, saving approximately $250,000 in annual delivery costs.
• The average turnaround time for a request within TRLN is 1.43 days versus 5.3 outside of TRLN.
• TRLN guarantees scholars a 48-hour maximum turnaround time on requests.

TABLE 3: Joint Licensing - Enhanced Access at Lower Costs

TRLN has expanded access to scholarly information and realized significant savings without sacrificing the ability to locally manage costs and collections. Expanded access, more content, cost containment, flexibility, and local control over costs and collections are attainable through principled negotiation. For more information on TRLN's licensing principles and guidelines, see http://www.trln.org/eresource/PrinciplesAndGuidelines.pdf.