Announcements

OhioLINK is pleased to announce that print borrowing among member institutions will resume on August 10th. The statewide print lending service, which temporarily halted operations amid response to COVID-19, will again support students and faculty as they return to campus for fall. Statewide, patrons borrowed on average more than 25,000 print items per month from OhioLINK libraries during the eight and a half months that lending services were operational in fiscal year 2020.

“While print borrowing is dwarfed by our members’ online access to OhioLINK’s e-books and e-journal articles, there are books and printed materials that are simply not available digitally—especially in the humanities,” said OhioLINK Interim Executive Director Amy Pawlowski. “We are happy this vital OhioLINK service will...

No Shelf Required is an open source of information on books and digital content for information professionals, including publishers, editors, authors, librarians, and educators. Editor and author Mirela Roncevic quoted Judy Cobb for her June 24th piece on digital accessibility.

"Judy Cobb, Manager of Digital Platforms at OhioLINK, Ohio’s academic library consortium serving 117 member institutions, says that the challenges on this front are enormous for libraries. Academic libraries want to ensure inclusive access for their users and, according to Cobb, for OhioLINK this includes more than 30 platforms and well more than 35 million pieces of content. 'Libraries are under increasing pressure to ensure all platforms and content meet the highest digital accessibility standards and we need...

OhioLINK announces the departure of Executive Director Gwen Evans. Deputy Director Amy Pawlowski has been named Interim Executive Director, effective February 28, 2020.

Statement from Gwen Evans…

OhioLINK is determining how it can support the sustainability of the OER materials created through the Ohio Open Ed Collaborative. We will continue to gather cost savings data. In addition, we are working to identify barriers to OER adoption and make recommendations for practical ways to address them. We'll continue to negotiate and monitor inclusive access agreements with commercial textbook publishers as long as those agreements provide value to our students.

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2020/02/11/guest-post-an-update-to-ohiolinks-affordable-textbooks-initiative/?informz=1

Note: Numbers for Inclusive Access came from publishers. Numbers for OER came from internal analysis.