South Africa's GAELIC : The Gauteng and Environs Library Consortium

The Gauteng and Environs Library Consortium (GAELIC) is the largest academic library consortium in South Africa. It was formed in response to conditions in the higher education sector at the time, and in recognition of the need to cooperate and become more cost effective. GAELIC's sixteen members represent the broad spectrum of university and technikon libraries in this country, from the well-established advantaged libraries to those that are small, remote, and disadvantaged. Overcoming the effects of the previous government's discriminatory approach through resource sharing and cooperation is an important objective of GAELIC, as evidenced in the implementation of the INNOPAC library system in all member libraries and in the ongoing work of its various task groups. * Background The Gauteng and Environs Library Consortium (GAELIC) is the largest academic library consortium in South Africa, located in the commercial and industrial heartland of this country. Young and dynamic, it came into being in April 1996, conceived in response to a variety of factors present in higher education institutions and libraries in South Africa at the time. The existing higher education system, shaped by colonialism and exploitation, perpetuated an inequitable distribution of access and opportunity for students and staff along the lines of race, gender, class, and geographic location. There were untenable disparities between historically black and historically white institutions in terms of facilities and capacities. The existing system had not succeeded in laying the foundations of a critical civil society with a culture of tolerance, public debate, and accommodation of differences. While South Africa's higher education could claim academic achievement of international renown, it was still characterized by teaching and research policies that favored academic insularity, with little response to the needs of South African society and the challenges and problems of Africa in a broader context.(1) A strong call for the comprehensive transformation of higher education in this country had emerged. Principles that were to guide the transformation process included redress, democratization, development, efficiency, academic freedom, and public accountability. There was to be a single, coordinated higher education system, characterized by extensive and intensive interaction among institutions, and resulting in cooperation, cost effectiveness, and partnerships. A new Higher Education Act, passed by Parliament in 1997, and the formation of a single Council on Higher Education, provide the necessary framework for this sector today. The Working Group on Libraries and Information Technology(2) in its Report of 1996 made a number of important recommendations to the Ministry of Education via the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE). While recognizing that the development of policy in respect of academic libraries needed to be coherent and consistent with national policies on information provision, this report emphasized the need for such policies to encourage cooperation on a number of levels: within institutions, between institutions, within regions, and between regions. Cooperative teaching, learning, and research projects offering smart IT solutions to enhance the higher education system were to be encouraged. A major theme running through many of the report's fifty-seven recommendations was cooperation. At a more grassroots level, during the 1980s and early 1990s South African university and technikon libraries found themselves in the difficult position of needing to change to open systems technology while being subjected to sanctions (in place against the then-Nationalist government) by overseas software vendors. This resulted in some libraries continuing to develop their own systems, and others opting to purchase one of the few library packages offered locally. …