IIM Consortium

The year 2000 was a landmark in the history of IIMs, with the formation of the IIM Consortia. IIMK took leadership in the formation of the IIM Consortia, and had the first meeting in Calicut. The objective was to ensure among the IIMs, optimum utilization and enhancement of the resources, and to minimise the expenditure by consortia based subscriptions to the commonly subscribed databases and journals. The idea was to approach publishers of CD-ROM Databases to begin with, as a consortia, for better pricing and services. Eventually, other digital databases and journals were also planned to be covered by the programme. The meetings were proved to be very productive and successful. During the first meeting itself, a host of databases were jointly purchased at very competitive prices, and a number of others promised supply of their products at a nominal cost.

In the case of journals, all the six IIMs put together subscribes to over 2550 scholarly titles of which around 1200 are duplications (overlapping titles). Among these, 33 titles are being subscribed to by all the IIMs. Having convinced on the dire need for a journals consortia, major publishers such as Elsevier, Kluwer, Wiley, Blackwell and MCB University Press were approached and they all represented in the second meet which was held at IIM Bangalore in 2001. The end result has been highly praiseworthy, that over 1500 E-journals IIMs are able to get online access, across all the IIMs, by paying a nominal additional amount.

The present information resource base of the IIM Consortium is as follows: