Due to developments in our niche market, both on the demand and supplier side, institutions (libraries or parent organizations) collaborate more in various forms of joint operations, many times referred to as consortium but not necessarily so.
Consortia or other forms of organizations that operate services for individual institutions have their own merits and to better accomplish these merits they have needs that individual institutions will never experience. One of them is that some consortia feel the need to coordinate and align their membership and benefits from IGeLU.
The IGeLU Steering Committee has discussed the option to offer a specific Consortial Membership model and checked our ideas about it with several consortia worldwide.
To accommodate the unique needs and functions of consortia representing multiple ExLibris customers, we will use the following model for consortial members:
Glossary:
The IGeLU Statute is mentioning (art. III, 1) “Membership shall be open to any body and/or
organization or group of bodies and/or organizations…”
The “group of bodies and/or organizations” will in this proposal be referred to as a
consortium, no matter what type of membership the consortium chooses to register.
IGeLU individual members:
o This is the regular membership.
o Any consortium that does not want to formally represent other institutions can register as an IGeLU individual member and will be treated and billed that way.
IGeLU consortium member: any IGeLU member that claims to represent other IGeLU members.
o It’s the decision of the consortium to claim this kind of membership.
o The IGeLU consortium member must pay for all the IGeLU members it represents and is responsible for all the administrative data of the IGeLU members it represents.
IGeLU consortium institutions: any IGeLU member that is represented by an IGeLU consortium member.
o This member does not pay itself and all administrative data comes from the
IGeLU consortium member.
o The membership voting rights depend on the choice of the IGeLU consortium member.
Rules:
- A consortium is an entity that presents itself to IGeLU representing a group of consortium institutions to become IGeLU member.
- Any agency or other collective operating group of libraries that claims the IGeLU consortium membership will be asked by the IGeLU administration to present an outline of the nature and operations of the consortium.
- The IGeLU Steering Committee has the exclusive rights to allow or deny this form of membership to any application for it to prevent abuse of the membership model for the sole purpose to benefit from reduced membership fees.
- Each consortium must provide a list of the IGeLU consortium institutions it represents annually, including the name of a contact person and related information for each Institution, to ensure we bill the consortium correctly and to allow consortium institutions attending the annual conference to get the correct member rate.
- The administration of each consortium institution in the IGeLU database is also needed to give each consortium institution separate credentials to logon to protected content on our website and to NERS.
- Each consortium can decide to transfer the voting rights from all consortium institutions to the consortium to allow for collective voting by the consortium. This needs to be decided at the start of every calendar year.
Fees:
Consortia will pay in one lump sum a fee of 80% of the total membership fees for each consortium institution, including the consortium member itself, they want to represent as IGeLU member.
Currently this would be 200€ per consortium institution instead of the 250€ IGeLU individual membership fee.
Benefits:
Consortial
- Reduced membership rates for each registered IGeLU consortium institution
- Reduced conference rates for each registered IGeLU consortium institution
- Access to member only documents such as conference presentations, news, and company/IGeLU updates
- Ability to vote on software enhancements (NERS) either as registered IGeLU consortium institution or as a IGeLU consortium collective.
IGeLU
- More members
- Better representation towards Ex Libris
- Higher income, more financial stability
The IGeLU Statute https://igelu.org/about-us/constitution states that the General Assembly will vote on the resulting consortial membership model with the resulting consortial membership fee to either approve or reject it.
The voting procedure will take place at the 11th IGeLU Annual Meeting in Trondheim (Norway), during the Assembly of Members, session 8 in the programme.
Kind regards,
Theo Engelman