A Consortium could be described as a group of organizations that come together to fulfill a combined objective that requires co-operation and the sharing of resources and needs to have a clear mutually beneficial goal to ensure its success.

The IIM Libraries consortium was the outcome of the desire of the IIM Librarians to actively venture into exploring the options for resource sharing. Besides encouraging the interlibrary loan practice, IIM Libraries also thought seriously of resource sharing in many other areas such as cooperative acquisition, cooperative processing and distributed utilization. The concept of IIM Libraries consortium was initiated in 2000 and the Consortium has successfully completed 18 years and is going strong with many new initiatives.

The main benefits of the IIM Libraries Consortium are to increase the access to e-resources with a minimum cost increase, standardization of prices of various products, collective representation of the interest of all member libraries, etc.

Growing from six IIMs, today the consortium consists of 20 libraries and with the establishment of more IIMs, we may see this number grow in the coming years.