University Library Cooperation in Israel: The MALMAD Consortium
Elhanan Adler · Information Technology and Libraries · 1999
The MALMAD (Israel Center for Digital Information Services) consortium was set up by the eight universities of Israel to serve as a common framework for the procurement and licensing of digital information. Now in its second year of operation, MALMAD provides a group of bibliographic and full-text services from a common budget and serves as joint negotiating and purchasing agent for additional services on behalf of ad hoc groupings of its members. MALMAD also initiates and manages special automation projects of common interest. * Background The history of university library cooperation in Israel began in 1969 with the founding of the Standing Committee of the National and University Libraries (SCONUL). SCONUL was set up as a voluntary forum of the directors of the central libraries of the seven then-existing universities in Israel.(1) SCONUL initiated the interlibrary loan system between the universities and set up a group of professional committees dealing with cataloging, acquisitions, reference, periodicals, circulation, and interlibrary loan. With the formation of more formal interuniversity bodies dealing with various aspects of library automation, SCONUL today deals primarily with nonautomation topics. Its committees are, however, still very active and serve as the de facto automation forums for each of the functions. The SCONUL cataloging committee is the only active forum setting cataloging policy, which is generally followed by the rest of the Israel library community. With the advent of automation, the Planning and Grants Committee of the Israel Council of Higher Education decided to become actively involved in funding development of the ALEPH system, originally developed at the Hebrew University, as a general system for all the university libraries. For this purpose, the Planning and Grants Committee in 1984 set up the ALEPH Steering Committee, consisting of the directors of the SCONUL libraries as well as representatives of academia and university computer centers. This committee negotiated both development of the ALEPH system (centrally funded) and prices of the services for the individual institutions. It also set up a subcommittee of the system librarians of the university libraries. In 1993 the Planning and Grants Committee decided that library automation was sufficiently mature to stop direct funding and be left to the universities themselves. The ALEPH Steering Committee was subsequently reorganized as the ALEPH Users Committee of the Association of University Heads, the organization of the universities themselves. The committee currently consists of the directors of the seven university central libraries, the director-general of one of the universities, the director of the InterUniversity Computer Center, and a faculty representative, with two additional nonvoting departmental library directors representing the faculty libraries of Hebrew and Tel-Aviv Universities. This forum currently deals with all policy matters relating to the ALEPH system in the university libraries. Its current chair is the director of the Jewish National and University Library.(2) Until 1996 the ALEPH Users Committee had no staff and its activities were performed on a voluntary basis, primarily through its system managers subcommittee. As it became clear that interuniversity coordination of standards, union catalogs, etc. required dedicated personnel, the Association of University Heads was convinced to fund the position of network coordinator. This position was created in 1996 and is currently held by the author of this paper. Gradually over the past few years, the ALEPH Users Committee found itself discussing automation matters other than those related to the ALEPH system. It became clear to the committee that there were significant potential benefits to jointly negotiating and providing digital information services. The ALEPH committee, however, was not a suitable formal framework to serve as a consortium. …