Penn State Reaps Benefits from CIC Membership

By Annemarie Mountz, Penn State

UNIVERSITY PARK – While the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) may not be as well known as its athletic arm, the Big Ten athletic conference, the consortium’s work greatly enhances its member institutions’ ability to advance their academic missions.
 
“While the average person walking across campus may not be too familiar with the CIC, virtually everyone at Penn State has reaped the benefits of our membership in the academic consortium in one way or another,” said Rod Erickson, Penn State executive vice president and provost, who also serves as chair of the CIC. “The behind-the-scenes efforts of the CIC allow us to achieve more collectively than we could as individual universities.”
 
The CIC, which includes all of the Big Ten schools and the University of Chicago, began in 1958. By pooling funding, people and other resources, the CIC creates agreements that include information technology infrastructure enhancements, cooperative purchasing programs, sharing of library resources across universities, joint academic and administrative leadership development programs, course/seminar and study abroad collaborations, and common programs for expanding the pool of minority graduate students and faculty.
 
One such technology benefit is Omni-Pop, a fiber optic network that links individual institutions into one network. “What that means is that your campus network is faster and has much greater capacity,” said Barbara McFadden Allen, director of the CIC. The network allows researchers to connect to send large quantities of data over the network and collaborate with researchers in other parts of the world.
 
“(The CIC) brings together really smart people from all these campuses,” Allen said. “They’re the best in the world at what they do. They don’t just come up with ways to solve problems, but they’re coming up with new models for how research is being done. We’re giving them the tools to make that happen.”
 
According to the CIC, member institutions have saved more than $28 million since 1998 through cooperative purchasing contracts. In 2008-09, the universities saved more than $5.9 million through collaborative purchasing and licensing efforts.
 
The CIC’s cooperative purchasing contracts, many of which have had Penn State involvement during the request-for-proposal phase, allow the institutions to make collective bids for items they purchase in bulk, such as various kinds of laboratory equipment, said Laura Weisskopf Bleill, a spokeswoman for the CIC. “Individually, they can get bids, but by using their collective bargaining power, they can negotiate deals to save (each institution) 5 percent to 25 percent,” she said.
 
Penn State saved more than $1.75 million in fiscal year 2009 through the use of the CIC collective purchasing agreements. “Specifically, we saved more than $347,000 through usage of the National Car Rental agreement, and we saved more than $1 million through the use of the scientific laboratory supplies agreement,” said Joyce Haney, director of Procurement Services for Penn State. Haney said since the inception of the CIC Purchasing Consortium in 2001, Penn State has saved more than $9.4 million through the use of CIC contracts.
 
Students also benefit directly from CIC programs.
 
Penn State participates in a program called CourseShare, which allows students to take long-distance specialized courses that aren’t offered at their home institutions. The videoconferencing courses most frequently offered are foreign language classes. Through CourseShare Penn State offers Middle Egyptian to students at other CIC institutions, and Penn State students have taken Hindi courses taught by the University of Minnesota. “The program enabled us to offer Hindi to our students for the first time,” said Susan Welch, dean of the College of the Liberal Arts.
 
Another program, called Traveling Scholar, allows graduate students to travel to other campuses to study and conduct research. Since 1963, the Traveling Scholar Program has allowed doctoral students to spend up to a full academic year pursuing specialized courses of study, researching unique library collections, and working in advanced laboratories and facilities at other CIC institutions with no change in registration procedures from their home university or additional tuition, according to the CIC website.
 
Students also take part in the study abroad collaboration called Alliance of Expanded Study Overseas Program. Through the program, Penn State students can access seven study abroad programs in six countries in addition to the many programs already offered through Penn State’s Office of Global Programs.
 
Penn State students’ on-campus scholarship also is enhanced by the CIC’s library partnerships. “For Penn State’s Libraries to be able to provide access to the collections of other universities is an invaluable resource for our researchers,” said Ann Snowman, head of access services in the University Libraries. “Our willingness to share our unique collections extends the same value to our consortial partners.” In 2009, Penn State supplied 10,196 items to CIC institutions through the library borrowing program and borrowed 14,549 items from other CIC member universities.
 
In addition to the printed materials, the CIC libraries are working on a collaborative effort with Google to digitize 10 million books that will be taken from collections at the member libraries and placed in a digital repository called the Hathi Trust.
 
“The Hathi Trust was conceived of as a repository for member libraries to archive and share their digitized collections. It started with content digitized by Google, but it is expanding to include a much broader array of digitized resources,” explained Tom Teper, associate university librarian for collections and associate dean of libraries at the University of Illinois.
 
Measuring the eventual value of this digitization to scholarship is difficult, but the amount of money Penn State would have to spend to digitize half a million of its own volumes is somewhere between $10 million and $30 million – a resource allocation that few, if any, of the CIC institutions would be able to allocate on their own to such an effort.
 
Teper said the CIC provides another form of support for the member libraries. “There are discussion groups for just about every type of librarian in the CIC, from library deans, to collection development officers to Japanese studies libraries. We are able to share collectively acquired wisdom, to collaborate on projects and to develop new projects.”
 
The provost of each member institution serves as a representative at the CIC, which meets several times a year. Penn State pays an annual membership fee of $115,610 for participation in CIC programs.
 
“Everyone is an equal partner,” said Bleill. “You get what you want out of it. Certain universities might be more engaged with different aspects such as the technology (programs) or the leadership development.”
 
The CIC is further governed and led by other groups of academics and administrators from the universities who serve on committees for the CIC’s various programs.
 
For more information about the CIC, visit online.