News Release – Page 2

Project ReShare Selects Boston Library Consortium as its Fiscal Sponsor

BOSTON, MA – October 12, 2023 – Project ReShare has selected the Boston Library Consortium (BLC), a formidable coalition of libraries in the northeast US, as its new fiscal sponsor. The BLC Board of Directors and the Project ReShare Steering Committee agreed that the partnership would be mutually beneficial, serving an integral administrative role within the ReShare Community and furthering BLC’s strategic priorities.

Project ReShare sets the standard for how libraries collaborate, share resources, and connect people to information. ReShare focuses on the development of open source, user-centered, standards-based, community-driven, and community-owned library resource sharing technologies and tools. Development of ReShare products is based on principles of co-governance of a shared technology roadmap.

BLC is committed to empowering libraries by fostering the sharing of knowledge, infrastructure, and resources at scale. Through its innovative fiscal sponsorship program, BLC provides essential infrastructure and services to projects that align with its charitable objectives, enabling them to concentrate on their missions and resource development, rather than on administrative operations.

Established in 2018 by a visionary group of libraries, consortia, information organizations, and developers, Project ReShare is entering a new phase of maturity, one focused on shoring up the development roadmap, governance, communication, and administration. “This is the ideal time to partner with the Boston Library Consortium on fiscal sponsorship,” said Lisa Croucher, Executive Director of TRLN and chair of the ReShare Steering Committee. “BLC has demonstrated its commitment to the values of Project ReShare and brings the infrastructure and skills that the Project needs now, on the precipice of expansion.”

Charlie Barlow, Executive Director of BLC and a member of the ReShare Steering Committee, agreed. “BLC has already demonstrated our commitment to Project ReShare through our investment in development of Controlled Digital Lending functionalities in ReShare Returnables,” he said. “BLC, in partnership with the ReShare Steering Committee and its Treasurer, will provide thorough and comprehensive oversight of ReShare finances.”

Both ReShare and BLC recognize the importance of collaboration, transparency, and innovation in the evolving landscape of library resource sharing. The combined strengths of the two organizations enhance the reach and impact of shared resources and shape the future of knowledge dissemination and access. This partnership underscores the shared belief that we can overcome challenges and redefine the boundaries of what libraries can achieve.

About Project ReShare

The ReShare Community is a group of libraries, consortia, information organizations, and developers who came together in 2018 to create Project ReShare – an open approach to library resource sharing systems. The ReShare Community has a bold vision for building a user-centered, app-based, community-owned resource sharing platform for libraries. ReShare members are setting a new standard for connecting library patrons to the resources and information they seek.

About BLC

Boston Library Consortium empowers a coalition of libraries in the northeastern United States to share knowledge, infrastructure, and resources at scale.

Founded in 1970, BLC’s strength lies in its diverse membership network of public and private universities, liberal arts colleges, state libraries, public libraries, and special libraries united by a commitment to champion innovation through collaboration. For more information, visit blc.org.

Contacts:

Lisa Croucher
Executive Director, Triangle Research Libraries Network
Chair, ReShare Steering Committee
lisa@trln.org

Charlie Barlow
Executive Director, Boston Library Consortium
Secretary, ReShare Steering Committee
cbarlow@blc.org

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Draft Vision, Mission, and Values, for Community Review

The ReShare Steering Committee has drafted vison, mission, and values statements for Community review. We invite feedback on these provisional statements through Friday, October 20, 2023, via this form.

Below are the drafts for review by the ReShare Community.

VISION

To serve as libraries’ competitive advantage in developing the most compelling innovation and agency in support of collections and resource sharing, while maintaining an inclusive and sustainable ecosystem that is fully accountable to its community of co-investors.

MISSION

To set the standard for how libraries collaborate, partner, share resources and connect patrons to the information they require by developing user-centered, standards-based, community-driven, and community-owned library resource sharing technologies and tools.

VALUES

Details of each of the five values listed below, including its definition and how it will be upheld and promoted, are available at this values overview document.

Trust
Community Ownership
Openness and Transparency
Sustainability
Impact through Innovation

ReShare update: scoping, membership, finances, and commitment to the vision

ReShare has grown substantially since it was first established in 2018, expanding from its initial 13 member organizations with a shared mission to create an open source, community-owned resource sharing platform, to having more than thirty member organizations by early 2023, offering a fully operational system. Four leading consortia – PALCI, ConnectNY, Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation, and TRLN – are actively using the ReShare platform, with CAVAL and Minitex in the process of implementing. The bulk of the initial software development work was provided by Knowledge Integration and Index Data, as well as Lehigh University Libraries. Development of ReShare’s controlled digital lending (CDL) functionality is also well-underway, in partnership with the Boston Library Consortium.

In Spring 2023, the ReShare Steering Committee recognized the need for a strategic planning retreat, given the meteoric growth of the community and increasing interest in developing a wide range of tools to address multiple resource sharing use cases. Questions around ReShare’s roadmap, sustainability, and development decisions were also growing as the potential scope of the project expanded.

The two-day intensive planning retreat was designed with the help of consultant and facilitator Dr. Deb Mashek. The retreat’s goals were to characterize the complexity of ReShare’s work, articulate learnings to date, and plan for the future in order to sustain the continuous and on-going development of the community.

Perhaps the most complex issues the Steering Committee grappled with during the retreat were 1) the recognition that two possibly competing platforms had emerged within the community with implications and risk to ReShare’s overall sustainability, and 2) a lack of consensus with respect to the meaning and implementation of “community ownership” in the context of ReShare product development. Central to this conversation were issues of sustainability and a focus on the ReShare Code of Conduct’s requirement that participants “not replace community infrastructure; instead, improve it.”

Pursuant to those retreat discussions, the Steering Committee reasserted that the ReShare software development roadmap, including the prioritization and application of any centralized, community funds or resources, must be owned and directed by ReShare’s membership.

On the final day of the retreat, the Steering Committee voted:

to support a pause in major roadmap decisions to enable the Steering Committee to reflect and fully articulate ReShare’s community ownership process in a way that engaged ReShare members;
to support an initial, if temporary, moratorium on the use of the ReShare brand name in describing the development effort that had previously been referred to as “DCB” or “direct consortial borrowing” (an effort which was initially defined in the MOBIUS RFP and funded by EBSCO) until its technical implications were more fully understood by ReShare members, and until it had been submitted and vetted through an accepted ReShare community process.* (See Notes)

At the retreat’s conclusion, members of the Steering Committee expressed a desire that ReShare’s community ownership processes be inclusive and applicable to all members, and that the features and functionality represented in DCB development efforts be integrated into ReShare’s platform and community ownership processes in the future.

Following the retreat, a number of ReShare members – namely EBSCO, Knowledge Integration, MOBIUS, MCLS, and Marmot – opted to depart from the ReShare community to support DCB development efforts external to ReShare with a distinct and separate set of business needs and expectations for community governance and process.

The ReShare Steering Committee’s decisions about the application of its brand name reflected careful consideration of project sustainability and scoping, keeping in mind the initiative’s core values of trust, transparency, and community ownership. While the retreat outcomes caused disruption that the Steering Committee is now addressing, the past few weeks have sharpened the Committee’s focus on service to library and consortia-articulated use cases, needs, and community expectations. Steering Committee members are working diligently on preserving the integrity of ReShare’s shared community development vision, and providing opportunities for effective future collaboration with external partners, including the newly separated DCB initiative.

Also following the retreat, and with the impending departure from the community of the organization that serves as the project’s fiscal agent, the Steering Committee began expediting the transition of the project’s financial management with a focus on transparency. The next Community Meeting will include a detailed financial report.

The ReShare Steering Committee will meet again on August 25, 2023 at the University of Chicago. The priorities for this meeting are to:

further define and articulate community ownership expectations and processes
revise governance structures and membership to support current and anticipated needs
create a plan for financial and organizational sustainability, including identifying a new fiscal agent to support an optimized and transparent financial model.

The Steering Committee has been energized by the opportunity to revisit and recommit to our initial vision. We have scheduled a community meeting for Thursday, September 14, 12:00-1:30 pm EST, via Zoom. Community members will be receiving a separate calendar invite for this meeting. In preparation for that meeting, we invite all members to share ideas and questions via this form. The community meeting will be an opportunity to discuss form submissions and to provide updates on product roadmapping. The meeting will be open to all ReShare community members.

Sent on behalf of voting members of the ReShare Steering Committee:

Charlie Barlow, Ginny Boyer, Kristin Calvert, Lisa Croucher, Sebastian Hammer, David Larsen, Boaz Nadav Manes, Julia Proctor, Zheng Ye (Lan) Yang

NOTES:

In August 2022, MOBIUS announced that it would implement ReShare Returnables alongside its migration to FOLIO. At the time, Knowledge Integration had indicated it would develop features in ReShare Returnables to support direct consortial borrowing (DCB) for MOBIUS, a core feature in their legacy INN-Reach system. Other ReShare member consortia also indicated interest in development of this functionality on the ReShare platform.

DCB fundamentally differs from other forms of ILL, lending directly to a patron at another institution, rather than to a borrowing/requesting library. To support DCB, ReShare’s underlying platform required significant modifications, and ultimately, Knowledge Integration, with funding from EBSCO, decided to pursue DCB functionality as a wholly separate software stack, with the intention to brand the product as “ReShare DCB.”

Because EBSCO and Knowledge Integration built DCB functionality via a competitive RFP process without direct input from ReShare’s Steering Committee or the wider community, DCB was not incorporated into the ReShare roadmap or evaluated under established processes to assess new functional requirements. The DCB platform, as it was developed for MOBIUS, is independent from ReShare’s existing code base.

UPDATE, 9/21/23: The original version of this news item has been updated to remove 1) a statement regarding fiscal agency and 2) the statement that the name of the DCB platform had not yet been determined as of original publication date.

UPDATE, 8/25/23: The original version of this news item has been updated to remove the statement that the DCB platform is “expected to be tied to EBSCO’s proprietary discovery platform, Locate.”

Introducing Reservoir, the module behind ReShare’s Shared Inventory

Clara Fehrenbach spoke with Sebastian Hammer, Co-founder and President of Index Data, to learn more about Reservoir.

ReShare Shared Inventory

A shared inventory and consortial discovery has been a foundational piece of the Project ReShare vision since the beginning. The 2021 ReShare Returnables launches at PALCI and ConnectNY went live with FOLIO’s Inventory module (dubbed “mod-inventory” in FOLIO-speak) as the basis for ReShare’s Shared Inventory storage, which in turn feeds into discovery layers, such as VuFind. Mod-inventory worked for its purpose, but it became clear that the way ReShare needs to ingest and use bibliographic data calls for a more flexible shared inventory infrastructure that is designed to ingest data from many different sources (i.e. individual member libraries in a consortium.)

Because ReShare was intended to be modular from the start, it was possible for Project ReShare and Index Data to be responsive to the needs of the community and update the infrastructure behind the Shared Inventory.

What is Reservoir?

Originally coined mod-meta-storage, Reservoir is the new underlying infrastructure of ReShare Shared Inventory. Based primarily on PostgreSQL, Reservoir was envisioned and realized due to community need, both to address inefficiencies discovered in the live environments at PALCI and ConnectNY and to support the onboarding of IPLC onto ReShare Returnables using their Platform for Open Data (POD) infrastructure. Reservoir is designed to be both fast (quickly handling a very large number of records) and flexible (poised to reuse its contents for future purposes.)

In order to accomplish speed and flexibility, Reservoir does not merge records as they’re imported in the same way that mod-inventory was designed to do. According to Sebastian, Reservoir works instead by “storing incoming bibliographic records separately and ‘clustering’ them using a match algorithm.” Then the records can be “merged” later for use in a consortial discovery layer or for other purposes. This method of clustering now, merging later was designed to allow much easier experimentation with different matching algorithms, since clusters can be reconfigured or rebuilt without needing a full data reload. It’s even possible to use more than one different matching algorithm at the same time with Reservoir.

Want to know how much faster Reservoir is? Consider this: Using Reservoir, it takes less than a week to ingest, merge, and process a collection of about 80 million bibliographic records. Before Reservoir, it would have taken approximately five months to complete the same process.

Why “reservoir”?

A reservoir is “a large natural or artificial lake used as a source of water supply.”

Taking inspiration from “data lake” terminology and imagery, Reservoir was named because it is envisioned as a data lake that ingests data from sources “upstream” and provides a supply of “clean” data to any service positioned “downstream.” Currently, the primary use of this data is in consortial discovery using VuFind, but it could be adapted for many different purposes, including consortial collection analysis.

Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation (IPLC) to Implement ReShare Returnables

The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation (IPLC) recently announced their intention to implement ReShare Returnables in Summer 2022. IPLC also intends to become a member of the ReShare Community.

IPLC writes “The new software will create more efficient staff workflows, eliminating some of the time and complicated steps needed to deliver items to patrons.”

Project ReShare Welcomes Boston Library Consortium

December 22, 2021

Project ReShare closes out the year by welcoming the Boston Library Consortium (BLC) to the ReShare Community. In addition to contributing leadership and engagement to the Project, BLC will be making a significant financial contribution. Founded in 1970, the BLC is an academic library consortium serving 21 public and private universities, liberal arts colleges, state and special research libraries in the northeastern United States.

The BLC’s collective collection has been a cornerstone throughout its history, and the consortium has always sought creative ways to leverage the collection for the benefit of member institutions. With the transformative opportunity of controlled digital lending (CDL), BLC is once again seeking an opportunity to make resource sharing more valuable and effective for its members.

BLC’s recent efforts to develop a path forward for consortial controlled digital lending (CDL) have illuminated the significant need for alternative resource sharing technologies to those currently available from vendors, in particular the need for community-led and community-governed alternatives such as Project ReShare. “The current library technology market has left libraries to cobble together solutions that meet local needs that fail to truly capitalize on the transformative potential that CDL offers,” said Charlie Barlow, BLC’s executive director. “The possibilities for an interoperable solution developed collaboratively by and for libraries and consortia hold great promise.”

The initial $100,000 financial commitment from the BLC is intended to accelerate the development path for CDL functionality within the ReShare client.

For Dorothy Meaney, president of the BLC and director of the Tisch Library at Tufts University, joining Project ReShare offers the BLC the opportunity to magnify its impact by collaborating with other libraries to collectively shape the future of both CDL and resource sharing more broadly. “Our goals for resource sharing align with those of other libraries and consortia,” said Meaney. “Through Project ReShare we see the chance to contribute our expertise and leadership in this space, for the long-term benefit of libraries.”

The BLC’s CDL Steering Committee, which is guiding the consortium’s implementation of CDL, is prepared to work directly with Project ReShare community members and developers on the development of CDL functionality. As a result of the work that the BLC has done thus far, coupled with its previous discussions with other Project ReShare members and staff from Index Data, the consortium has a great deal of expertise and vision for CDL, and how this can manifest in practical, impactful solutions for libraries and consortia.

Tim McGeary, chair of the Project ReShare Steering Committee, praised BLC’s investment in Project ReShare. “We recognize that such a large financial commitment isn’t possible for everyone, but we hope BLC’s investment will serve as a model for other potential members,” McGeary noted. “Interest in Project ReShare is increasing rapidly, and the financial investments are crucial to our being able to meet the development expectations of the community.”

The decision to join Project ReShare was approved unanimously by the BLC Board of Directors.

About Project ReShare

The ReShare Community is a group of libraries, consortia, information organizations and developers, with both commercial and non-commercial interests, who came together in 2018 to create Project ReShare – a new and open approach to library resource sharing. The ReShare Community has a bold vision for building a user-centered, app-based, community-owned resource sharing platform for libraries to set a new standard for how we connect library patrons to the resources and information they require.

For more information, contact info@projectreshare.org.

To receive email updates from Project ReShare, please sign up for the Project ReShare news list at https://projectreshare.org/contact.

About the Boston Library Consortium

Founded in 1970, the Boston Library Consortium (BLC) is an academic library consortium serving public and private universities, liberal arts colleges, state and special research libraries in the northeastern United States. The BLC members collaborate to deliver innovative and cost-effective sharing of print and digital content, professional development initiatives, and projects across a wide range of library practice areas. For more information, visit blc.org.

Three New Members Join Project ReShare Steering Committee

The Project ReShare Steering Committee welcomes its three newest members after our latest round of elections for at-large members. The newly elected members are Kristen Calvert (Western Carolina University), Pamela Jones (ConnectNY), and Zheng Ye (Lan) Yang (Texas A&M).

Kristen Calvert is currently the Department Head for Discovery and Technology Services at Western Carolina University. For the past 10 years, Kristen has worked with e-resources, collections, technology, and resource sharing. Kristen has been an active member of the UNC Shared ILS task force and serve on the Consortium of Shared UNC Print steering committee. As the past Content Organization and Management Department Head, Kristen was responsible for WCU’s ILL unit and migrated WCU from ILLiad to Tipasa in 2018. Kristen’s new responsibilities include Project Management for technology projects, including our migration to a new content management system for digital collections.

Pamela Jones is the Executive Director of ConnectNY, a consortium of independent academic institutions in New York State. Pam has over 37 years of experience in public, academic, and special libraries in addition to her work with ConnectNY. Pam currently serves on the CC-PLUS Steering Committee, the Partnership for Shared Book Collections Operations Committee, the Empire Library Delivery Advisory Committee, and the Empire Archival Discovery Cooperative Advisory Committee. She is an experienced editor, writer, presenter, communicator, and consultant, as well as an avid gardener.

Zheng Ye (Lan) Yang is the Director of Document Delivery Services at Texas A&M University Libraries. She was responsible for planning and implementing the popular Get It service, and has developed innovative and responsive services for faculty and students that have become models for other institutions worldwide. Because of her pioneering work, she is frequently consulted by peer institutions and invited to give presentations across the nation about interlibrary loan/document delivery services. As the interim Associate Dean for Document Delivery/Interlibrary Services, Collection Development, Electronic Resources, Acquisition, Cataloging, and Stacks Maintenance, she worked with collections and technical services to coordinate alignment of library services with current campus research and teaching needs. She is an advocate for the resource evaluation, delivery and discovery processes that connect the TAMU community members to information resources.

ReShare Implementation: An Interview with Jill Morris, Executive Director at PALCI

PALCI went live with ReShare Returnables in August 2021. Clara Fehrenbach, Document Delivery Services Librarian at the University of Chicago and ReShare Communication Team member, interviewed PALCI Executive Director Jill Morris about the implementation.

Project ReShare: When did PALCI go live with ReShare Returnables?
Jill Morris: PALCI went live with ReShare powering its well-known EZBorrow consortial interlibrary loan service on August 12th, 2021. Within just a few short days, we were already seeing requests being generated through our patron search/browse interface (the shared VuFind ReShare discovery layer) and books being delivered to borrowing PALCI institutions. The first patron-initiated ReShare book request to make its way into the hands of a library patron originated at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. The item was supplied and delivered by Drexel University in Philadelphia in less than 48 hours. The system correctly identified Drexel University as a supplier for the item, and the staff at Drexel processed the request in ReShare, getting the book to the user even more quickly than most Amazon Prime purchases.

Kacey Feduke holds up the first book received through ReShare — Kacey Feduke of Dickinson College receives the first book for a patron less than 30 hours after going live with ReShare.

PR: What features of ReShare are most exciting for PALCI?
JM: From the consortium office perspective, we’re thrilled to have the means to support library configurations with a central directory and other staff-facing tools that support easy problem solving and troubleshooting. We can see what’s happening with each request from the moment the patron clicks a button, and while it’s hidden from patron-view, staff can use that information to ensure the system is working properly behind the scenes. We also love the new shared index that was developed as a part of this system to support the sharing of collections. At a glance, we can search and understand what’s held collectively within the PALCI community.

PR: What are you hearing from member libraries about ReShare?
JM: Library staff are telling us that they like the opportunity to communicate back and forth with each other, right at the point of need. A message feature allows you to connect with the individual working on a specific request without the need for separate email chains and reference back to other systems. We’re also hearing that many faculty users enjoy the discovery interface where they can browse for and filter searches to identify the materials they’re seeking at our 50+ participating EZBorrow libraries.

PR: What has your experience been like leading up to your implementation?
JM: PALCI decided to join the ReShare community prior to it having the name ReShare. For two years prior to ReShare’s official start, a working group within PALCI made up of resource sharing experts, library developers, systems staff, and consortial leadership had put a great deal of effort into identifying and defining a preferred future for next generation resource sharing. In early 2017, it was determined that threats of market consolidation were increasing, and that there was no existing system that would meet the needs of the future defined by that group, so we began seeking out partners to create solutions. The group agreed that it was essential for our choice to include an investment in open and interoperable library infrastructure so as not to repeat the same issues of the past, and so that the end result would remain under the control of the community that developed it. After making our initial contribution to help co-fund the UX design and development work, the decision to implement ReShare was an easy one. We had played a role in designing the system’s requirements, and ReShare represented the potential for innovation and the future our community had defined several years earlier.

The implementation of the system itself was mostly front-loaded with steps to ensure we could properly map the holdings of each library’s collections into our shared index so they could act as suppliers in the system. Setting up the cloud-based tenants for each library was a relatively straightforward process. Our service provider, Index Data, hosts and maintains the implementation. Each library received its own distinct URL and login to set up its staff users. Once set-up, libraries were able to configure their institution’s pickup locations and prioritize various locations and branches as suppliers. The ReShare interface gives our consortium staff tools to help configure the settings for each library, and because most of our libraries already had standard NCIP functionality in place (a set of protocols that allows a central system to talk to disparate ILS systems), we were primarily working through an iterative process of configuration and testing. We have at least 12 different types of ILS systems in use by PALCI libraries, plus a variety of discovery tools. ReShare’s use of standards, like NCIP, and open APIs, allowed us to connect to each ILS seamlessly, and in the future, the system will be capable of discovery integrations with local systems too.

We were determined to go live with our implementation just prior to the start of the Fall semester to ensure we’d have enough staff back in the office. The launch also coincided with many staff returning to on-site work after more than a year of COVID-related disruptions. We also waited to make sure that ReShare integrations with other tools, like ILLiad, were well on their way to completion. Our biggest hurdle was the sheer volume of institutions we needed to connect, and the many system configuration combinations those libraries represented.The implementation was fast and furious as we approached our target date — PALCI was the very first implementer to go live, and as we went along, we identified some configuration issues that needed resolution prior to implementation. Fortunately, the ReShare development team delivered on solutions each time we encountered a problem, and none of the issues prevented us from using the system. We managed the implementation largely in cohorts, and relied on our community to help support each other in developing system documentation and user guides that will benefit other consortia in future. Today, we have 53 libraries actively using ReShare, and we expect to bring on 15-20 additional libraries in the next 6-12 months.

PR: What advice do you have for others considering ReShare?
JM: With most proprietary platforms, libraries have to expect that commercial business interests will ultimately win out in all product roadmap decisions, driving further vertical vendor integrations and less choice in the marketplace overall. After all, commercial entities offering proprietary solutions are set-up to operate for profit, whether or not the solutions that drive that profit are actually benefiting users of the service to the fullest extent desired by consumers. ReShare represents an important opportunity to break that cycle and give libraries a real voice in the process. It’s a chance for libraries to co-invest in and shape the future of sharing collections by providing choice and potential for innovation — keeping libraries’ and patrons’ needs front and center through a shared vision and governance model. ReShare is a brand new software – and there are some growing pains that come with that choice. The software is not yet as mature as others out there on the market. Yet the system is breaking new ground with its implementation of ISO18626 — the newest ILL standards, and it’s laying a foundation for greater system interoperability in the future. It’s an investment that all libraries should be thinking hard about making when faced with the choice. Along those same lines, I think perhaps ReShare’s most important asset is its community. The team of developers from Index Data and Knowledge Integration together in partnership with a group of consortia and individual libraries is unlike most library community projects in that we have a deep wealth of expertise, transparency, shared interests and alignment around vision.

Recording and Slides from the October 2021 Project ReShare Open Community Meeting

We’re pleased to share the recording and slides from Project ReShare’s October 14th open Community Meeting.

In this meeting, Pam Jones (Connect New York) and Jill Morris (PALCI) explained their decisions to adopt ReShare Returnables for their consortia. From a practitioner point of view, Maureen O’Brien Dermott (Dickinson College), Liz King (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,) and Michele Matthews (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) talked about their experiencing implementing and using ReShare Returnables.

Graphic showing relationship between active users, project community and prospective implementers. They overlap and join in the middle.

Kristin Wilson (Index Data) talked about the relationship between ReShare service providers and libraries/consortia implementing and using ReShare Returnables.

Finally, Kelly Farrell (TRLN) shared ways that Project ReShare community members can get involved with the project.

News Release — GALILEO Initiative Joins Project ReShare

September 21, 2021

The inclusion of GALILEO as a new member of Project ReShare dramatically increases the number of institutions affiliated with the project. GALILEO, Georgia’s virtual library, is a community of more than 2,000 institutions, including colleges, school districts, and public libraries. . Project ReShare is pleased to welcome GALILEO to the rapidly growing ReShare community. Current ReShare membership is available on the Project ReShare web site. Information about GALILEO, its programs, and membership is available at https://about.galileo.usg.edu.

An initiative of the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia (USG), GALILEO offers many programs to its community, including GALILEO Search, Affordable Learning Georgia, the Digital Library of Georgia, and GALILEO Interconnected Libraries (GIL). “We’re pleased to begin working with ReShare,” remarked Lucy Harrision, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Library Services and Executive Director of GALILEO. “While we don’t yet have a specific timeline for implementation, we’re very optimistic about the prospect of an open source resource sharing application. We look forward to working with ReShare leadership to develop a roadmap and expand our portfolio of services to the GALILEO community.”

In addition to paying an initial membership fee, GALILEO will be offering in-kind support by way of accessibility audits and testing by staff who have received training from the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation at Georgia Tech. Other in-kind offerings include provision of user stories for multi-type consortia as well as consultation on governance models. As a roadmap and timeline for adoption becomes clearer, GALILEO hopes to provide additional support and increase its investment further.

“The ReShare leadership has already benefited from our initial conversations with GALILEO about how they might contribute to and benefit from participation in the project,” said Tim McGeary, Associate University Librarian for Digital Strategies and Technology at Duke University Libraries and chair of the Project ReShare Steering Committee. “We look forward to integrating the GALILEO team into the ReShare community.”

The ReShare Community recently celebrated an important milestone with the launch of ReShare Returnables by two long-standing consortial members, PALCI and ConnectNY.

Background

For more information, contact info@projectreshare.org.

To receive email updates from Project ReShare, please sign up for the Project ReShare news list at https://projectreshare.org/contact.