Appreciating OhioLINK
The press release reprinted below reminds us all how very fortunate we
are for the services provided to us via OhioLINK. Our entire educational
experience would be greatly diminished without the critical resources
OhioLINK provides.
November 21, 2001
OhioLINK Delivers More Than 20 Million Items And Kicks
off 10th Year of Service
COLUMBUS, Ohio - The OhioLINK program, the nation's leading
academic library consortium, proudly announces the delivery of more than
20 million documents as it enters its 10th year of service to the Ohio
higher education community. This major milestone demonstrates the value
and growth of the program, and the ongoing support it receives from the
78 participating colleges and universities, the State Library of Ohio,
and the Ohio Board of Regents.
The 20 million documents delivered include a variety of
library resources and materials: traditional books, electronic books,
videotapes, online research and newspaper articles, and online literature
among others. In just the last month, the OhioLINK program delivered its
3-millionth library book, users downloaded the 4-millionth scholarly research
journal articles from the Electronic Journal Center and the 5-millionth
business/general interest article.
Many of today's college students take OhioLINK services
for granted, but in 1992 students and faculty conducted research in a
very different way. Students were usually restricted to the books and
journals available in their campus library, and they might have had access
to a limited number of databases on CD-ROM. Faculty that wanted resources
beyond what their campus library had were forced to travel to another
academic library or request books and journal articles through interlibrary
loan. Interlibrary loan could take 2-3 weeks or more, depending on the
requested material. In November 1992, all that began to change with the
introduction of a service known as the OhioLINK Central Catalog. . .
Today, Ohio's college students and faculty have downloaded
four million scholarly research articles from the EJC without ever visiting
"the stacks". This is an even greater accomplishment for a service that
went live only three-and-a-half years ago and is still doubling its annual
usage. In addition to this, students and faculty have had three million
physical items delivered to their campus through the Central Catalog's
online requesting service. Statewide online requesting first debuted in
1994. Three million delivered books in eight years is eight times the
number of items requested through traditional interlibrary loan in Ohio.
Along the way, the OhioLINK program also added 90+ core
online research databases, linked many of those databases directly to
the related full-text article, and introduced the Digital Media Center
(DMS), a collection of non-print media databases that features both commercial
and Ohio-based collections and archives. In a continuing commitment to
improvement, this year will see additional improvements to the user interfaces,
the addition of more Ohio-based collections and archives to the DMC, the
addition of a multi-database searching option, and the addition of a live,
real-time chat reference service. The OhioLINK program's tenth year of
service as the leading academic library consortia will be a dynamic one
is spite of recent reductions in funding resulting from the State's budgetary
problems.
The OhioLINK program is a consortium of academic libraries
from 78 Ohio universities, colleges, community colleges, and the State
Library of Ohio. More than 600,000 students, faculty and staff have access
to OhioLINK's integrated local and central catalogs, an online borrowing
system, 90+ research databases including full-text resources, a multi-publisher
e-journal collection, a digital media collection, and document delivery
services.
OhioLINK
Member Institutions
