About the Consortium

Serbian Consortium for Coordinated Acquisition of Electronic Resources (KoBSON) connects Serbian libraries. Leading scientific libraries in Serbia initiated the creation of the Consortium in 2001, and those were:

• The National Library of Serbia, Belgrade
• The Matica Srpska Library, Novi Sad
• The University Library “Svetozar Markovic”, Belgrade
• The University Library “Nikola Tesla”, Nis
• The University Library, Kragujevac
• The Library of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade
• Serbian Academic Library Association

The main goals of this joint activity were the following:

• optimized acquisition of  foreign scientific information,
• a switch from paper editions to electronic versions
• improvement of access to electronic information,
• promotion of local scientific publishing.

What does KoBSON do?

• obtains funding for the acquisition of scientific information, their promotion or user education by participating in local and international projects, administers funding,
• makes decisions about the acquisition of scientific information after conducting surveys with all interested members and after the thorough analysis of results, negotiates with the publishers (suppliers) of journals and databases with the aim of getting the best price,
• signs license agreements on using the services to which it has subscribed,
• creates, updates and maintains the website available to end users in Serbia;
• installs and maintains all network databases in the central computer which have to be available to all users,
• keeps record of the use of all acquired scientific data and informs the Consortium financiers.

[The original version of the text taken from the КоBSОN website]