Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt corporation established in 1986 to develop resource sharing and licensing among the libraries of private academic institutions in Southern California. Today, SCELC represents a diverse community of 110+ Member and 230+ Affiliate institutions and organizations across multiple states and is one of the top five consortia in licensing volume in all of North America. SCELC’s portfolio of consortial licensing, programming, and services is enabled by our commitment to building relationships and nurturing networks between our libraries and with our vendor and publisher partners, as well as our mission to empower librarians to collaborate on access to and the effective use of library resources and services.
APU Libraries save millions of dollars on electronic resources annually because of our membership with SCELC.
APU Libraries has committed to retain almost 40,000 older and infrequently held books for 15 years. In partnership with other SCELC Libraries, there is a commitment to retain over 2 million books. You can view these books by going to the Shared Print Catalog.
Libraries, museums, and other institutions hold rich and unique collections critical to research, teaching, and learning. Yet these collections can be difficult for scholars to discover and use, not to mention time-consuming and expensive to support. This is why ITHAKA launched an initiative to make special collections discoverable and free of paywalls to a global community of faculty and scholars, and to make sure the content remains accessible for generations to come. Over the past three years, nearly 300 JSTOR Open Community Collections charter members made more than 1,600 specialized digital collections openly accessible worldwide on JSTOR. Results have gone well beyond on-platform discovery—to date,these collections have garnered more than 3.3 million item requests from 234 countries and territories, with 63% of this traffic coming from the open web. In addition to increased usage, this has also brought greater visibility to contributors.