Announcements

OhioLINK has awarded grants to 29 faculty from 19 Ohio colleges in its third round of Affordable Learning Open Course Redesign Grants since March 2022. The program is intended to accelerate faculty adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) and remove barriers to use in order to save students’ money. Providing support and assistance for faculty to transition away from commercial textbooks has proved a crucial incentive.

To mitigate the cost of higher education for students, the Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK) launched the Affordable Learning Ohio initiative. The initiative is helping faculty members at Ohio colleges and universities develop, discover, and utilize no- or low-cost-to-student teaching materials, including Open Education Resources (OER), library-owned resources, and OhioLINK-negotiated Inclusive Access textbooks.

OhioLINK, a division of the Ohio Department of Higher Education (ODHE), created the Affordable Learning Course Redesign Grant in March 2022 to help accelerate adoption of OERs and remove barriers to use. The program offers two grant funding cycles, in the spring and fall, to help faculty members identify OERs that complement their curricula.

“College affordability is a top priority of the DeWine-Husted Administration and the...

OhioLINK, Ohio’s academic library consortium, has entered into a 3-year transformative agreement with IOP Publishing (IOPP). The agreement provides OhioLINK member institution authors the opportunity to publish unlimited open access articles at no cost to the author and at no additional cost to OhioLINK institutions. In addition, OhioLINK library users have expanded reading access to 72 IOPP journals across the fields of physics, materials science, biosciences, astronomy and astrophysics, environmental sciences, and mathematics. The contract began on January 1, 2023 and will continue through December 31, 2025.

“I’m happy to be able to add these important benefits for our members without additional costs for our institutions or the state of Ohio,” said OhioLINK Executive Director Amy Pawlowski. “OhioLINK has enjoyed...

Affordable Learning Open Course Redesign Grants will help an additional 30 faculty members explore teaching with no-cost-to-student course materials. See the announcement for the full list of grant recipients.

OhioLINK has used additional Governor’s Emergency Education Relief (GEER) funding to purchase four new collections of shared digital books and streaming video. The new library resources support a broad curriculum for teaching and learning. Faculty can utilize two of the new collections for no-cost-to-student teaching materials, augmenting OhioLINK’s digital library of more than 180,000 digital books and other electronic information resources available to students and faculty at institutions across the state.

OhioLINK has completed a strategic planning process that will guide the statewide academic library consortium’s work with members through the next three to five years. The Strategic Framework, based on feedback gathered from OhioLINK members, positions the organization to support its 117 member libraries as they navigate the changing post-pandemic higher education landscape. 

“Since OhioLINK’s work is so collaborative, our process was as important as the outcome,” said OhioLINK Executive Director Amy Pawlowski. “Engaging our active library community in this strategic exercise was critical to creating a plan that directs OhioLINK’s efforts where they can have...

OhioLINK marks its 30th anniversary in 2022. This paper, the second of two parts, reviews the organization’s history through selected formative milestones and provides observations about the evolution of the consortium from its current executive director, revealing the importance of expanding cost-effective and easy access to scholarly resources, economies of scale, pushing technology, and a focus on the user.

The update adds new search functionality and an improved user experience to a collection of streaming music offered as part of OhioLINK's core digital library for teaching and learning.

An Integrated Library System (ILS) is the backbone of library operations and used to manage circulation, acquisitions, and cataloging, as well as to generate the underlying data that drives library business decisions and reporting. OhioLINK will leverage cooperative purchasing power and shared technical expertise to cover the cost of the software and the migration process for its member institutions.

In Times Higher Education, Amy Pawlowski and Gwen Evans talk about how library teams can prepare and protect their digital services from cybersecurity threats. Key takeaway: be prepared to rethink your systems and service providers in the event of a cyberattack.