WHY WANTED THE ESTABLISHMENT OF ANKOS?

In our age characterized as the age of information, speed and technology; access to reliable information in the fastest and easiest way has gained importance, the transfer of information from the printed environment to the electronic environment has become widespread, and technology has become almost limitless in accessing information. As the Internet has created a new universal space for information sharing, collaboration and trade, consortia have become imperative; since the 2000’s when electronic magazines began, large libraries around the world have come together to create consortiums to make it easier and more economical for the user to access information. ANKOS (Anatolian University Libraries Consortium), which was established for the same purpose in our country, started its work in 2000 with a joint subscription to three databases of 12 member institutions. ANKOS today has more than 60 publishers with 1628 agreements with 83 separate databases; It is a consortium, a professional association, a large volunteer community that has 155 members of universities and research institutions and has approximately 50 employees, and has taken its place in the international arena.

AIM OF ANKOS:
Universities and research libraries the most affordable price, the more e-resources access and to ensure, in the framework of economies of scale, sharing of investment in these products, performing academics and students access to the highest levels of the global information network in Turkey, training and collaboration to improve the support of the library to research it is to carry out.

CONSORTIUM OBJECTIVES:
– Ensuring joint policy union among members on issues such as taking into account the rational development of databases of subscribed or purchased e-books and the purchase of more resources to meet the educational and research needs of users of institutions participating in the consortium.
– Providing continuous training of staff and exchange of staff among the member libraries.
– Increasing the participation of ANKOS in international developments by cooperating with appropriate institutes and organizations in domestic and abroad regarding copyright, license agreements and other consortia around the world.
– Turkey attempts are necessary to ensure the development of academic libraries.

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE OF ANKOS

ANKOS President:
İsmail ÇETİNKAYA – Isparta University of Applied Science

Board members:
Ayça AYDEMİR MAZLUMOĞLU – Acıbaden University
Zeynep METİN – Boğaziçi University
Özlem EFE – Özyeğin University
Mine KESKİN – Kırıkkale University
Hanife Gül BOZKURT – Adnan Menderes University
İlhami TÜRKYILMAZ – Amasya University

ANKOS WORKING GROUPS:

  • License Agreements Group
  • Public Relations Group
  • Statistics Group
  • Open Access & Institutional Repositories Group
  • Ankos Academy Group
  • Ankos Database Assessment Working Group

ANKOS RESEARCH GROUPS:
– Collaboration Group

ANKOS DATABASE RESPONSIBLE

ANKOS’S WORKS:
With its professional librarians, ANKOS follows and evaluates new products in line with the needs of the scientific world of our country. Following the developments in the world of knowledge; based on the fact that the ratio of library budgets to university budgets is around 3-4% in developed countries, this ratio is around 1% on average in our country; acts with the consciousness and responsibility of the fact that there are large differences between university library budgets in our country, inadequate library budgets, opening too late during the year, negativities in the tender law and practices, and the lack of sufficient and qualified staff negatively affect the efficiency of libraries and thus the access of researchers and students to information.

ANKOS to develop cooperation between libraries and librarians in our country; to increase the knowledge of young generation librarians in contemporary librarianship fields; they have had experience in the use of e-information, presentation and evaluation. ANKOS, which tries to meet the expectations of new generation information users using web-based information technologies such as Web 2.0, library 2.0, follows and evaluates the e-information market in line with the needs of our country’s scientific world with its professional librarians and presents it to the information of its members. ANKOS Web site has been constantly updated and became the information sharing platform of its stakeholders.

Based on the importance of adequately promoting and explaining the resources and services owned as libraries, ANKOS, in order to help find new ways to get value for money spent from library budgets, in 2009, in collaboration with ANKOS – ÜNAK, Zuzana Helinsky’s “Library Resources and Services Marketing – Practical Guide” The book titled Turkish was translated and published.

With ANKOS annual meetings held regularly every year since 2001, librarians and company representatives come together and librarians can keep up to date with the latest developments in the world of knowledge.


ANKOS MEMBERSHIP

ANKOS, Turkey and the TRNC universities and subscription to electronic resources field by a consortium of higher education institutions, consisting of founding members; is an institutional entity represented by libraries / information services officers. All of Turkey and the TRNC universities and higher education institutions are naturally ANKOS They are members and candidates if they apply is recognized as a candidate, it will benefit from the trial access; If they start a subscription, they are transferred from the candidate membership to the member category.

ANKOS, in order to support research activities in our country, if the application is deemed appropriate as a result of the examination by the Board of Directors of the institutions that need to cooperate with ANKOS in terms of electronic resource subscription or purchase in the context of research and education studies and information services, if the manufacturer of the product of interest also approves the participation, the Consortium Participant It makes use of trial accesses within organizations and includes it in consortia of certain products. However, ANKOS reserves the right to set quotas and freeze attendance for such participation if the time required to run the business exceeds the time that can be allocated by the volunteers assigned from the ANKOS member institutions with the permission of their managers.

HOW TO BE ANKOS MEMBER / PARTICIPANT INSTITUTION?
Universities and other public research institutions can apply to ANKOS Presidency as a member / participating institution with the following documents:

  • Official letter sample to be used by universities for ANKOS membership. There is  available
  • Participant form in other public research. There is available

Institutions without ANKOS membership cannot subscribe to ANKOS lists, and cannot benefit from the use of trial databases and discounted consortium prices.


ANKOS MEMBERSHIPS:

ANKOS, which has attached great importance to international solidarity with libraries in other countries, since its establishment; It has been a member of the Association of Southern European Libraries (SELL-Southern European Libraries Link) since 2001, including Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. The SELL meeting, where regular meetings are held and views are exchanged, was held in 2009 between 18-20 May, hosted by İzmir Institute of Technology.

The European Branch of the Scientific Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC-The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), which was established in the United States in 1999 to break the monopolies of commercial publishers, to prevent price increases in scientific journals and to create a competitive environment, opened in 2002 and ANKOS Europe has supported this initiative as a member of SPARC. The open access and open archives initiative initiated by SPARC has become one of the most talked about issues in publishing and librarians around the world and is becoming increasingly common.

ANKOS is also a member of the International Library Consortium Coalition (ICOLC-International Coalition of Library Consortia) and the Electronic Resources Statistics Standards Association (COUNTER-Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources).

ANKOS supports the ULAKBİM EKUAL project domestically; Within the scope of this project, it expects the technical and financial support of ULAKBİM for the storage of electronic information, which is a temporary type of information based on the subscription model, on behalf of our entire country (e-archive) in order to become permanent. With the awareness that the storage of information is one of the most important issues waiting for a solution, under the leadership of ULAKBİM, ANKOS collaboration believes that a national e-archive structuring will be an important step for our country. Considering that today a medium-sized library has reached over 20,000 e-journals, it is impossible to depict the chaos that would result from the cessation of access to information in our country in the event of a possible international crisis.