academic

I've wondered this for ages, but now it seems quite personal. I found a citation for an article on 1960s student radicalism that is directly related to my research, but while it is hardly an esoteric journal and my school gives access to some years of it, this does not extend back far enough to do me any good. I'm curious why this would be the case. It is a history journal and my school offers graduate-level history programs. I suspect that it may be a consequence of how academic institutions subscribe to databases. Is access to a wide variety of journals bundled together and sold as a package to the schools? Dumb question. What I mean here, is how many options or levels of package do schools have available to them? Maybe I think too highly of those in charge of assessing student requirements at my own institution, but access to this particular journal just seems like such a no-brainer to me that I feel the school just must have a limited ability to dictate what they want. Any articles or writings on this subject would be of great value to me.