The National Electronic Site Licence Initiative (NESLI) is an attempt to hasten the replacement of printed journals with their electronic equivalents in UK higher education. Effectively a national consortium ± NESLI ± aims to achieve attractive pricing models for electronic content. However, there is also a strong desire to ensure the interoperability of the various electronic services available to the academic and research community. As such, NESLI is part of the Joint Information Systems Committee's (JISC) Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER). This paper discusses the background to the initiative, its aims and objectives, the role of the Managing Agent and what has been achieved to date, as well as the plans for the immediate future. It goes on to consider the possible implications for the world outside of UK higher education, the lessons learned so far, and the viability of the NESLI model. NESLI 19services. There was also a feeling among some publishers that the role of the subscription agent was becoming less obvious. NESLI was is in some senses born as the successor to the HEFCE[2] (Higher Education Funding Council for England) sponsored Pilot Site Licence Initiative (PSLI), which began in January 1996 and effectively ended in December 1998. The PSLI provided government funding to reduce the unit cost of information, and concentrated primarily on paper based information. As the three-year initiative drew to a close, however, it was clear that many issues concerning the use, access and purchase of electronic journals remained to be addressed. HEFCE made it clear that their central or top sliced funding would not be available after the three-year project was over.With these issues in mind, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)[3] advertised for and selected a consortium of Swets & Zeitlinger[4] and The University of Manchester[5] via Manchester Computing[6] as the Managing Agent for NESLI, a new self-financing initiative to run for three years from 1 January 1999.

The National Electronic Site Licence Initiative (NESLI) aims to promote the widespread delivery and use of electronic journals in the UK Higher Education and research community. The initiative has been established by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils. This article provides some background and reports on the significant progress made thus far.

The ‘traditional’ academic library system model – i.e. a central system constructed around a common catalogue record that also dictated the end‐users' view – is breaking down. Systems that were constructed to handle the processing and lending of printed items are no longer capable, on their own, of dealing with the variety of different information resources handled by modern academic libraries. A great deal has been written about how end‐users expect more ‘Web 2.0’ features than library catalogues currently provide. New front‐end services have been designed by libraries and library system providers to cater for this need. However, not much has been written about the needs of internal library staff who struggle with processing, handling, and supporting the huge volume of electronic resources subscribed to by libraries. Electronic resource management systems have been developed to cater for these needs, and new standards for data interchange with such systems have been developed. Just as standards were important in encouraging electronic data interchange (orders, invoices, claims, etc.) between libraries, publishers, and agents in the last century, so new standards are evolving for such transactions in the electronic era.