Massachusetts Conference of Chief Librarians of Public Higher Educational Institutions records

The Massachusetts Commonwealth Consortium of Libraries in Public Higher Education Institutions, originally the Massachusetts Conference of Chief Librarians of Public Higher Educational Institutions (MCCLPHEI) is an organization comprised of the library directors of the twenty-nine campuses of the Commonwealth's public higher education system. It originated in 1968 as an informal advisory group to the Board of Higher Education for the purpose of coordinating the expenditure of eleven million dollars on a six-year “Books for College Libraries” project. At the first meeting, Frank Jones, Chief Librarian at SMTI (now UMass Dartmouth) was elected as chairman, and the main topic of discussion was how to implement the impending bond issue for books. Since 1974, MCCLPHEI has become an advocacy group for library funding, and has implemented resource sharing in the electronic age. MCCLPHEI's mission is to provide collective advocacy and education for strong fiscal resources to serve the information needs of our users, and to advance the intellectual, cultural, and economic opportunities for our students, faculty, and all other citizens of the Commonwealth.