News: Texas VR curators form first purchasing consortium with Archivision Digital Library

Efforts to negotiate Texas purchasing consortiums with digital image vendors have been ongoing over the past few months. With the blessings of 17 visual resources curators in the state, I made contact with the vendors on our behalf. Negotiations with Scholars Resource is ongoing, but I am pleased to report that a discount group has been formed with Archivision, Inc., a major vendor of architectural digital images. This agreement allows all Texas universities, colleges, community colleges, museums, and secondary schools to license the Archivision Digital Photo Research Library (currently over 29,000 images) at a huge discount over individual purchases through Scholars Resource. Schools will automatically receive the discount when ordering the entire archive from Archivision. The Texas Discount Buying Group is the first state discount group for Archivision and will become their model for other states and provinces.

The group discount allows all Texas institutions to pay the same low, per student fee for the images in the base collection of 16,000 images with even greater discounts for additional modules offered by Archivision. Images come in JPEG format, with TIFF images available at an additional charge. Institutions can specific the format for the data they receive. Total cost for the archive depends upon the number of students enrolled at the institution. Southern Methodist University and Rice University have already licensed the archive using the discount group pricing, saving thousands of dollars for both institutions. Schools interested in more details should contact Susan Jane Williams at Archivision, 866-712-4627 or susan@archivision.com.

Eileen W. Coffman, Director
Lady Tennyson d'Eyncourt Visual Resources Library
Southern Methodist University