Changes in the delivery of information challenge the ability of individual libraries to provide their end users with a comprehensive range of information sources. Annual inflation rates for journals soar well above the annual inflation rate, much less the budget allocations to most library material funds. While inflation rate for books has remained more reasonable, the number of titles printed each year also grows. The end result is that individual library budgets can not expand or even maintain the same percentage of materials published each year. In Ohio, a state-wide consortium of academic libraries recognized that individual libraries could not ever provide all of the information resources needed by their end users. As a result of their determination to overcome this limitation, a group of more than 70 libraries in the state of Ohio is celebrating the results of 10 years of cooperative library services.

The roots of this consortium date back to 1989, when the Ohio Library & Information Service (OLIS), issued a planning paper. This paper called for a statewide effort to share collections, expand access to academic collections, and improve scholarly communications. Following the appearance of this paper, OLIS changed its name to OhioLINK to reflect the desire to allow libraries to collectively meet the needs of the academic community throughout the state.

To facilitate access to books, OhioLINK developed a central catalog which contains catalog records from member institutions. The catalog currently contains 22.9 million records, including more than 10 million unique titles. Circulating items in the catalog can be requested electronically by end users at any institution in the state and are delivered in a matter of days via OhioLINK’s state-wide courier system. This year, end users have placed more than 500,000 requests through the central catalog. The requests are evenly distributed between faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students. Once initial concern about statewide borrowing was that an undue strain would be placed on larger research libraries, which had larger and more comprehensive collections. Instead, analysis of requests indicates that ration between requests placed by institutions for materials elsewhere mirror the number of requests received by that institution for materials from other institutions.

One reason that the number of books at OhioLINK institutions continues to grow is that the state assisted institutions within OhioLINK have created 5 regional depositories which currently hold more than 4 million books. The creation of the depositories frees libraries from the dilemma of discarding books because of limited space or costly expansion projects. Less frequently used materials can be relocated to the depository, freeing up room for more heavily used or more current materials. End users can electronically request lesser-used items from the depositories. Within days of their request, they receive photocopies or the hard copy of a book. Current plans call for reducing time delays by experimenting with electronic delivery of materials in the depositories.

To overcome the delivery time needed to ship print copies of materials, OhioLINK has also explored ways of delivering electronic books to end users. By working with netLibrary, ABC-CLIO, and ITKnowledge, OhioLINK has created a collection of more than 20,000 titles which end users can access directly from library catalogs at institutions across the state.

OhioLINK has also moved to develop consortial licensing agreements with database providers and journal publishers. In addition to obtaining access to databases at a reduced cost, OhioLINK has also created a single interface for most of the indexes and databases (Dataware) provided through OhioLINK and a single interface for electronic journals (the Electronic Journal Center). Dataware indexes are configured to compare citations of each article with holdings in the OhioLINK Central Catalog and indicate to the end users which libraries can provide the journal article cited. In addition, Dataware indexes also cross-reference the Electronic Journal Center holdings, and provide a link from an article citation to an electronic version of the article if it exists within the Electronic Journal Center. The number of databases has grown since the inception of OhioLINK to include more than 80 databases which now receive close to 12 million searches annually.

Publishers currently included in the Electronic Journal Center include Elsevier, Academic Press, Project Muse, Kluwer, Springer, and many more. Negotiations with several other publishers are currently underway. The number of electronic journal articles delivered to end users has swelled along with the number of titles available to 2.6 million.

In addition to purchasing resources from existing publishers, OhioLINK is also exploring ways to publish information developed at colleges and universities in the state of Ohio. One effort is the Digital Media Center (DMC). The DMC began as a digital collection of more than 70,000 images obtained through commercial providers, satellite images of the state of Ohio, and a collection of Sanborn maps owned by an Ohio library. To further develop the DMC, OhioLINK is actively containing costs by partnering with libraries in Ohio to add additional collections of resources, rather than rely on commercial aggregators. Examples of collections which have been added include historical photographs about the Wright brothers, foreign language videos, physics demonstrations, images from a Mayan archaeological expedition. Many more collections will be added soon. The cumulative number of images delivered now exceeds 150,000. The interface for browsing or searching the DMC is the Dataware interface developed for electronic journals.

Another bold new venture in publishing materials is the Electronic Theses and Dissertation (ETD) project. Although it is a new service, it already includes more than 800 electronic copies of theses and dissertations. The ETD center provides a central clearinghouse where end users can browse or search for this scholarly research and obtain copies electronically, rather than having to wait for a hard copy to be shipped to them. This arrangement also benefits libraries by eliminating the possibility of damage, loss or theft of an original copy of a thesis and dissertation.

The proliferation of online version of materials which have traditionally been available only inside the library building has created the need to provide online support. OhioLINK is currently beta testing an electronic reference system which enables librarians to interact with end users in real time. Librarians using electronic reference software can exchange messages with the end user, and if necessary, send screen shots to them. By offering electronic reference as a statewide service, OhioLINK also maximizes a valuable commodity: librarian time. By sharing librarians, it becomes possible to offer reference service at hours when the traffic in individual libraries may not justify having a librarian on duty—but questions in the combined member libraries of OhioLINK might. Another option currently under discussion is developing a system which ensures that a librarian with expertise in specialized areas such as medicine, law, or business is available online during peak hours for those questions. Currently many institutions have only one or two librarians with expertise in these areas, and these individuals can’t be available at all the hours reference services is available. By assembling a statewide schedule for these specialists, OhioLINK offers the possibility of providing expertise to institutions with few or no specialists in these challenging areas.

Future endeavors by OhioLINK will focus on evaluating the effectiveness of the vast array of resources and services which has developed over the past decade through a variety of mechanisms. One way of benchmarking will be participation of OhioLINK institutions in LibQUAL+, a survey designed to measure service performance. This survey has previously been administered primarily at large research libraries. Results of the 2002 LibQUAL+ will help to determine how the availability of OhioLINK services and resources made available in the past decade have affected end user satisfaction with the libraries. The results from benchmarking with institutions outside the consortium will help OhioLINK to expand and improve resources and services in the decade to come.