A self-supporting library service in a rural region: a new look at hospital consortia.

To meet the informational needs of health care practitioners and trainees in a four-county rural area of northwestern North Carolina, the eleven-member UNIFOUR Consortium was founded as a two-year experimental project from 1978 to 1980. The consortium has several unique features: (1) it is an organization of institutions, not libraries; (2) it employs its own professional librarian who manages a central library, coordinates consortium programs, and makes regular circuit visits to all affiliated institutions; (3) the central library, where the circuit is based, is a developing community hospital library, not an established academic medical center library; and (4) it is ultimately tied to the Northwest Area Health Education Center and that organization's emerging learning resources network, which includes the Bowman Gray School of Medicine, Library, two other subregional libraries, and the libraries of all member institutions. At the end of the experimental period in 1980, member institutions voted unanimously to continue the program and assume their share of the costs.