Friends of the Libraries' Guest Columnist Features Libraries are extraordinary By Julia Zimmerman July 10, 2004 The Athens Messenger

These are times of dwindling state funding, budget cuts and staff reductions. The public perception of state government, as well as of college and universities, is that there is too much inefficiency and waste. But from my 25 years of experience as a librarian, I can tell you that Ohio's academic library system is a remarkable success story.

It vividly demonstrates how the state, working with its college and university libraries, has achieved enviable efficiencies while providing an extraordinary level of service to students and faculty.

OhioLINK is the centerpiece of this state library system. It is a consortium of 83 college and university libraries, built on cooperation, technological innovation, and modest but steady state support.

OhioLINK has harnessed the power of the Internet in three major ways. At the top of my list is the Electronic Journal Center, or EJC. The EJC provides computer access to over 6,000 journals containing over 4 million articles.

By leveraging its own funds with subscription dollars from member libraries, OhioLINK provides access to more journals than any single library could afford. Even Ohio State, Ohio's largest university library, receives many titles through the EJC that they couldn't otherwise purchase.

Internet access to the EJC means that professors and students no longer must walk to the Library, pore over an index, search for a journal in the stacks, and photocopy the pages. Full text is available from their computers in homes, dorm rooms and offices. Faculty members tell me about research projects that would have been impossible without the speed and convenience of the EJC.

A second major program is its Book Depository program. Five storage facilities -- one in each quadrant of the state and one in Columbus -- houses lesser-used library materials. The depositories have probably saved hundreds of millions of dollars in library construction costs. The Hwa-Wei Lee Library Annex on Columbus Road houses over 600,000 books on 20-foot-high shelves in a compact storage arrangement. When requested by patrons, books are retrieved and delivered to Alden Library within hours.

Finally, there's the OhioLINK Central Catalog. Ten years ago, a handful of university libraries pioneered a book-sharing system based on a single data base that, today, contains almost every item owned by Ohio's academic libraries. Our students and faculty can request a book from any of these libraries with just a few keystrokes. Within two to three days, the book arrives at the Athens campus, ready to be checked out.

OhioLINK's Central Catalog now includes almost 39 million items -- more than twice as many as Harvard University, the largest and richest academic library in North America. It's an incredibly rich resource for students, teachers, and researchers. It enables Ohio's libraries to avoid duplication and gives scholars far more "bang for the buck."

Libraries, with their commitment to great customer service, have been aided by breakthroughs in communication technology and information science to provide Ohio students and researchers with a jewel of a library system. But there's something in it for you, too. By joining the Friends of the Libraries for only $30, you can have the very same access to the OhioLINK Central Catalog.

Julia Zimmerman is Dean of Libraries at Ohio University.