Feature Stories
Government Resources: Five Colleges of Ohio
Public Library Partnerships to Support Early Literacy
Westerville partnerships with OhioLINK and Search Ohio: Then and Now
State Library Partners with the Ohio State School for the Deaf
From Selover Public: Partnership Ideas…Like A Good Book----A Fresh Idea Is Always Waiting!
August 2007
Interlibrary Loan Services
As part of its committment to statewide resource sharing the State Library of Ohio's Serving Every Ohioan (SEO) Library Center provides Interlibrary Loan services through OCLC for its 71 library systems at 156 locations. The success of this service would not be possible without the strong collaborative effort each library contributes everyday. By working together libraries are able to provide their patrons with resources that each library could not provide on its own.
"OCLC’s union catalog contains over 84 million bibliographic records" said Becky Kellum, Reference Supervisor at SEO Library Center. "If a patron can't find an item on the SEO Consortium Catalog, we try to locate that item for them through OCLC. We have handled 11,271 OCLC requests since January 2007 for our members. SEO also participates in lending out materials to other OCLC libraries throughout the United States. We have had 5,781 items from our collection requested through OCLC and have been able to send out 2,115 items"
State Librarian Jo Budler in her testimony before the Subcommittee of Higher Education of the House of Representatives in March described the benefits of the interlibrary loan system. " When I visited Carnegie Public Libary in Washington Court House, Fayette County, Director Susan McDaniel told me that her library collection is 71,000 in number. Last year that is the exact same number of items she brought into her building through Interlibrary Loan from other libraries across the state of Ohio in response to requests from her library users. In effect, by participating in resource sharing through the SEO consortium, she was able to double the number of resources available to her community without adding a single item to her own library shelves. This is an incredible savings and an incredible service."
Serving Every Ohioan(SEO) Library Center is located in Caldwell and is a branch of the State Library of Ohio. For more information about the SEO Library Center and their collection visit http://seoweb.seo.lib.oh.us/
State Librarian’s Report
State Librarian
It hardly seems possible that it was two years ago that the State Library staff and the Regional Library System directors first met to discuss the shrinking funding problem. At that time the RLS line item in the State Library budget had decreased more than 40% over the course of two biennia. It was clear: $1 million was not sufficient to support seven Regional Library Systems.
On June 22, 2006, four Regional Library Systems (RLS) were chartered anew or created by amending prior documentation. At this same State Library Board meeting, the State Library Board allocated the funding to the new Regionals. (For more info on this go to www.library.ohio.gov/publib/rlsrecommendations.html
Since that time the RLS have been working at their own “re-creation” and at a new collaborative relationship with one another. This has been highly successful as is evidenced by the shared programs (for example, NORWELD’s Saving Your Community's Memories which is being offered across the state) and by the statewide programs which the RLS have offered in the past year (e.g. the Children’s Services Symposium, Tech Connections 8, the upcoming Collection Development Symposium). It is this kind of collaborative and cooperative spirit that allows for continuing education opportunities to be openly accessible to all librarians and library staff members across Ohio. The CE opportunities are also what allow the Ohio library community to upgrade and improve library services to all Ohio residents – which is a shared goal across the library community.
