Blake Reagan, Micheline Westfall, Corey Halaychik

The University of Tennessee Library Council recently honored three UT staff members for working to streamline the purchase of library materials across UT campuses. Not long ago, Corey Halaychik, Blake Reagan, and Micheline Westfall finalized the one-hundredth “master agreement” with a library vendor.

The UT libraries typically negotiate hundreds of licensing agreements each year with publishers of books, journals, and electronic resources. Many of those agreements are with the same group of publishers, yet each contract must be scrutinized annually by each campus for compliance with state laws and university policies. A master agreement, governing all subsequent purchases from a participating vendor, can eliminate costly hours of contract review and significantly speed up the purchase of library materials.

Over the past year, Halaychik and Westfall, both faculty members in UT Knoxville Libraries’ Licensing, E-Resources, and Serials Department, worked in close collaboration with Reagan, director of Contracts Administration for the University of Tennessee System, to negotiate a series of master agreements with library vendors. The agreements benefit all schools in the UT System and allow each UT library to bypass the yearly contract review process for new and renewed subscriptions. The libraries can now order books, journals, and electronic resources from participating vendors through a simple purchase order. On the Knoxville campus, the library has reduced the number of its vendor contracts by more than half.

In a ceremony on June 4, Sandy Oelschlegel, chair of the UT Library Council and director of UT’s Preston Medical Library, presented a “Resolution of Thanks” to Halaychik, Reagan, and Westfall for their “outstanding service and meaningful contributions to the University of Tennessee libraries and their patrons through the successful negotiation of past and future master agreements.”