Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Keynote address: Involving the customer in library planning and decision making
- 3 Denmark's Electronic Research Library: evaluation of services through user surveys and usability tests
- 4 Beyond the guidelines: assessment of the usability and accessibility of distributed services from the users’ perspective
- 5 Online services versus online chaos: evaluating online services in a Greek academic library
- 6 The Hellenic Academic Libraries Consortium (HEAL-Link) and its effect on library services in Greece: the case of Aristotle University library system
- 7 Information seeking in large-scale resource discovery environments: users and union catalogues
- 8 A ‘joined-up’ electronic journal service: user attitudes and behaviour
- 9 Climbing the ladders and sidestepping the snakes: achieving accessibility through a co-ordinated and strategic approach
- 10 The impact of library and information services on health professionals’ ability to locate information for patient care
- 11 We know we are making a difference but can we prove it? Impact measurement in a higher education library
- 12 Proving our worth? Measuring the impact of the public library service in the UK
- 13 Outcomes and impacts, dollars and sense: are libraries measuring up?
- 14 Longitude II: assessing the value and impact of library services over time
- 15 The use of electronic journals in academic libraries in Castilla y León
- 16 The integration of library activities in the academic world: a practitioner's view
- 17 Monitoring PULMAN's Oeiras Manifesto Action Plan
- 18 Enabling the library in university systems: trial and evaluation in the use of library services away from the library
- 19 Towards an integrated theory of digital library success from the users’ perspective
- 20 The role of digital libraries in helping students attend to source information
- 21 A DiVA for every audience: lessons learned from the evaluation of an online digital video library
- 22 Usability evaluation of Ebrary and OverDrive e-book online systems
- 23 Tearing down the walls: demand for e-books in an academic library
- Index
6 - The Hellenic Academic Libraries Consortium (HEAL-Link) and its effect on library services in Greece: the case of Aristotle University library system
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 June 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Keynote address: Involving the customer in library planning and decision making
- 3 Denmark's Electronic Research Library: evaluation of services through user surveys and usability tests
- 4 Beyond the guidelines: assessment of the usability and accessibility of distributed services from the users’ perspective
- 5 Online services versus online chaos: evaluating online services in a Greek academic library
- 6 The Hellenic Academic Libraries Consortium (HEAL-Link) and its effect on library services in Greece: the case of Aristotle University library system
- 7 Information seeking in large-scale resource discovery environments: users and union catalogues
- 8 A ‘joined-up’ electronic journal service: user attitudes and behaviour
- 9 Climbing the ladders and sidestepping the snakes: achieving accessibility through a co-ordinated and strategic approach
- 10 The impact of library and information services on health professionals’ ability to locate information for patient care
- 11 We know we are making a difference but can we prove it? Impact measurement in a higher education library
- 12 Proving our worth? Measuring the impact of the public library service in the UK
- 13 Outcomes and impacts, dollars and sense: are libraries measuring up?
- 14 Longitude II: assessing the value and impact of library services over time
- 15 The use of electronic journals in academic libraries in Castilla y León
- 16 The integration of library activities in the academic world: a practitioner's view
- 17 Monitoring PULMAN's Oeiras Manifesto Action Plan
- 18 Enabling the library in university systems: trial and evaluation in the use of library services away from the library
- 19 Towards an integrated theory of digital library success from the users’ perspective
- 20 The role of digital libraries in helping students attend to source information
- 21 A DiVA for every audience: lessons learned from the evaluation of an online digital video library
- 22 Usability evaluation of Ebrary and OverDrive e-book online systems
- 23 Tearing down the walls: demand for e-books in an academic library
- Index
Summary
About HEAL-Link
The Hellenic Academic Libraries Link (HEAL-Link) was established in 1998. It began as a project funded by the Ministry of Education (with part EU funding) as a horizontal action aiming to promote co-operation within the academic library community in Greece. One of the action lines was to study possible co-operation between the academic institutions to face the problem of the ever-increasing cost of subscriptions to print journals. Until then, the academic libraries dealt with this problem by cancelling more and more subscriptions every year.
A study undertaken in 1999 in three disciplines (physics, chemistry and computer science) in five universities proved that the journal collections of the corresponding departments were so limited that they could not support most of the research areas or the graduate study programmes of those departments. With a very limited national journals collection, academic libraries depended heavily on interlibrary loans from abroad, mainly from the British Library, with a high cost which they passed directly to the users. Thus, most researchers who could not themselves finance their need for journal articles were dependent mainly on requesting them from colleagues abroad. It goes without saying that most Greek academic libraries, in their effort to sustain their journals budgets, had hardly any subscriptions to bibliographic databases.
As a result the aim to co-operate in print journals collections was abandoned and replaced by the effort to co-operate in common access to electronic journals. In 1999 HEAL-Link signed a three-year licence agreement with five major publishers for access to all their journals, as well as a small number of bibliographic databases. For the first three years the academic libraries were obliged to keep their print subscriptions with the above-mentioned publishers, while HEALLink covered the access fees. Thus all members of HEAL-Link had access to 3500 full-text journals and to 12 bibliographic databases, which was a vast improvement over the previous situation.
In 2002, at the end of the three-year period, the eight institutions having the vast majority of the print subscriptions could no longer sustain the cost of the subscriptions to the five publishers, and HEAL-Link had no more funds from the horizontal action to support the access fees.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Libraries Without Walls 6Evaluating the Distributed Delivery of Library Services, pp. 45 - 52Publisher: FacetPrint publication year: 2006