Westerville partners with OhioLINK and Search Ohio: Then and Now

Partnerships always begin with a handshake and a smile.  In successful partnerships the smiles tend to broaden.  Using that scale, at the Westerville Public Library (WPL) the staff and library customers are grinning ear to ear.

On April 11, 2005, Westerville entered a pilot project with the Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK) that gave WPL customers access to millions of library items owned by Ohio’s institutions of higher education.  OhioLINK is a consortium of 86 Ohio college and university libraries and the State Library of Ohio.  Westerville was the second public library to pilot with OhioLINK, with Cuyahoga County Public Library (CCPL) starting their program in August 2004.

How and why did the relationship between WPL and OhioLINK develop?  WPL board members and administration saw the partnership as an opportunity for Westerville customers to increase their access to materials by tenfold as well as share the WPL collection of wide-ranging popular materials with Ohio’s academic libraries.  Westerville’s catalog of nearly 400,000 print and electronic resources would leap to more than 40 million when it became linked to the master records of the OhioLINK institutions.  The conveniences would be many:  with all participating libraries being Innovative Interfaces, Inc. system users, the mapping and coding would be easily completed; the requests for books would be filled in a more timely fashion with borrowers receiving items within two to three days; and the U.S. Cargo delivery service would be a cost saver among all facilities.

The transition was a smooth one.  The WPL catalog provided a link to the OhioLINK catalog and a page describing the service.  For those online visitors accustomed to placing interlibrary loan requests the concept was familiar, and, thanks to the integrated catalog, the steps to request the item, select a pickup institution and choose a pickup location were easy to follow. 

During the initial nine months of the joint project with OhioLINK Westerville customers used the service to borrow 3,316 items, and 6,495 items were loaned to OhioLINK member institutions.  The end-of-year usage figures at WPL for 2006 were 6,046 and 11,824 respectively.

When it became apparent that the teaming of the WPL and the CCPL public library catalogs with the OhioLINK master catalog of academic libraries was an operational success and a hit with users of both types of libraries, in order to build upon the partnership with OhioLINK, several Ohio public libraries using Innovative Interfaces, Inc. formed the Search Ohio consortium to expand the win-win situation.  Founding libraries are WPL and CCPL.  Toledo-Lucas County PL, Warren-Trumbull County PL and Youngstown-Mahoning County PL joined in June 2006 to create a library consortium that makes seven million items available to communities of northeast Ohio.  In September 2007 three new libraries, Cuyahoga Falls Public Library, Greene County Public Library and Portage County District Library, will join Search Ohio and be joined with OhioLINK.  The funding for the Search Ohio hardware was provided by the Gerald Kline Foundation, with a $20,000 grant awarded to WPL to cover the cost of the server.  Costs for implementing the system and maintaining it at Westerville are shared by all Search Ohio member libraries.

The partnerships with OhioLINK and Search Ohio are beneficial for both customers and staff at WPL.  Borrowers have been taking advantage of the diverse items held by the Search Ohio public libraries as well as the OhioLINK academic libraries.  When Westerville retired the formats of audio tapes and VHS, customers desiring tapes for their in-car players and classic videos of older TV series started requesting them from Search Ohio public libraries.  Westerville customers use OhioLINK to request volumes that give in-depth treatment to topics such as religion, law and medicine -- those that a public library is less likely to purchase due to space, budget and other considerations.    

Customers appreciate the speedy arrival of materials, in contrast to the time it took for older interlibrary requests that often went out of state.  The staff has noticed the increase in requests, especially on Monday mornings, but as Adult Services Manager Nieca Nowels comments, “The time we spend filling the orders for outgoing items is well worth the wide range of incoming materials and the financial savings gained through collaboration with other libraries.”  Figures for the first half of 2007 demonstrate the increased activity with partnering libraries:   6,493 items borrowed and 13,522 loaned by WPL.         

The future is exciting for the OhioLINK and Search Ohio partnerships.  The joining of the two organizations is scheduled for October.   The resulting combination of valuable resources will put even wider smiles on the faces at WPL and all participating public and academic libraries.

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