In the waning years of the 20^th century, South Carolina ’s academic libraries faced a rapidly evolving information environment.  Library leaders from the state’s public and independent colleges confronted rising costs and novel opportunities.  They realized that South Carolina would have to devise strategies to accomplish more with fewer resources. Their creative response to this dilemma took the shape as PASCAL, the Partnership Among South Carolina Academic Libraries, in 2001.

Initiative and leadership came initially from the SC Commission on Higher Education, the public university Library Directors' Forum (LDF) and the SCICU (South Carolina Independent College and University) Library Director's Council (LDC). These directors envisioned a highly productive knowledge environment where members of our academic and research community have equitable, immediate access to library information and services regardless of their location and at the time they are most needed.

Drawing on the example of pioneering statewide programs such as Ohiolink, Galileo(Georgia)and VIVA {Virginia), they formed a consortium to foster cooperation and search for synergy among member institutions. Fifty-four public and private institutions, with the help of the Commission on Higher Education, the SC State Library, Division of the CIO, and the Department of Archives and history began to get the consortium off the ground. A mission statement and strategic plan were adopted in late 2001 and revised in December 2003.  The latter plan outlined three major initiatives:

• Statewide borrowing of print materials, built around integrated library system replacement, a union catalog and a rapid delivery system;  
• Common access to electronic research journals and databases;
• Increased access to cultural heritage materials– the SC digital library initiative.

Sensing the potential benefits of such a program, the South Carolina General Assembly provided funding (FY2003-4) for a “statewide electronic library” for higher education on a one-time basis.  They have renewed this funding in each subsequent fiscal year.

PASCAL has pursued these major initiatives in a variety of ways. The key program for the statewide borrowing initiative has been PASCAL Delivers, a rapid book delivery service that aims to make circulating books in the collections at any academic library in the state available to faculty, staff and students at any other institution. PASCAL Delivers is usually able to place books in a borrower’s hands within three days, and it does so in an extremely cost-efficient way.  Thus, it differs fundamentally from traditional inter-library loan, which often requires weeks to execute, and is costly.

Preparation for this program required modernization of many library systems, and the construction of a common database, or union catalog.  By the end of 2007, this ambitious dream is well on the way to being realized. Thirty-eight colleges and universities are now part of the PASCAL Delivers system, and the union catalog contains about nine million items. The remaining schools will be joining through the course of 2008. Thus, PASCAL Delivers represents a massive expansion of resources readily available to the roughly 300,000 students at South Carolina ’s institutions of higher education, and it has begun to positively benefit their education. An interesting measure of success is word that the verb “to pascal” has entered the lexicon of many South Carolina students; students speak of having “pascaled” a book in much the same way they speak of “googling” a topic.

The ILS modernization that was prerequisite for this system was funded by the institutions, while state monies have supported operation of the delivery system.

PASCAL has pursued its second initiative – common access to electronic research journals and databases – by utilizing state funds to leverage access to core research materials far more cheaply than would be possible if each school were to act alone. Each dollar spent centrally on electronic resources returns $6-8 dollars in value over what could be acquired by a single library. PASCAL’s investment in core resources has benefited smaller schools mightily.  PASCAL’s general licenses provide access to more than 12,000 journals. With these resources, small colleges have seen their electronic resources grow by 3,000%. Thus, students at these schools now have information access beyond the reach of even the largest universities just a few short years ago. Meanwhile, larger research institutions have been able to build deeper research collections thanks to the state support for core materials.

In the past two years, PASCAL’s the emphasis for PASCAL’s electronic resource collection has been on the sciences, particularly biology and health. PASCAL has licensed the two key journals of record for sciences, Nature, and Science Online, as well as other core collections for science education. In early 2008, PASCAL substantially upgraded the resource environment for nursing education, negotiating licenses with the three major publishers of nursing literature for over 1242 nursing and allied health journals, as well as clinical support resources.

Taken together, these programs – funded through the general assembly – have opened the doors to the “highly productive knowledge environment” envisioned in 2001. This is a substantial contribution to South Carolina ’s efforts to compete successfully in the global economy in the new millennium.

The SC Digital Library Initiative has also borne fruit. With the support of the South Carolina State Library through four federal LSTA grants, PASCAL and its member-partners  researched technologies, developed prototypes and established standards, and have launched an effort to provide a centralized portal to existing archival collections in digital format, and to foster a concerted program for building digital collections in the state.  After several years of incubation within PASCAL, this initiative looks as if it will mature into an allied entity, the South Carolina Digital Library.

PASCAL also works directly with its members to improve library operations. Most notably, the consortium provides 13 academic libraries with operational support for their integrated library systems, in cooperation with the state’s Division of the CIO.