Open Project ReShare Meeting on March 20

We are pleased to open up our regular quarterly ReShare community meeting to anyone interested in Project ReShare on March 20th at 12pm ET. 

During this call, we’ll describe the development progress made by the community to-date, share news of current implementations, and give insight into future development directions.

We invite you to join us, learn about ReShare, and discuss!

When: Mar 20, 2023 12:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0pduGqpzsqGNa-7XE-IPDF5pcGSXNC072Y

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

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.

Questions about ReShare? Our documentation wiki is here to help!

While many library staffers are already using ReShare everyday, they may not know that the project has been working to create a comprehensive documentation hub.

The ReShare documentation wiki features detailed descriptions of core software features, such as request states, processing actions, and external integrations. It also includes workflow guides designed by librarians that bring together groups of functions commonly used together.

You can find a link to the documentation wiki at https://projectreshare.org or access it directly at https://openlibraryenvironment.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/PR.

In the coming months, ReShare will continue to expand this documentation with the help of the project community. If you are interested in helping to support the documentation effort, please contact us at info@projectreshare.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.

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

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.

Returnables 1.2 demo, recording, and other resources from May 26 community meeting

The May 26, 2021 Project ReShare community meeting, which was open to the public, included a project update by Tim McGeary (Project ReShare Steering Committee chair), a demonstration of ReShare Returnables 1.2 and an overview of the roadmap by Kristen Wilson (Index Data Project Manager/Business Analyst), and lightning talks by Sean Cwiek (MCLS), Adam Olsen and Joel Marchesoni (Western Carolina University), Matthew Reidsma (Grand Valley State University), and Blake Graham-Henderson (MOBIUS).

As a follow-up to that meeting, which was hosted on Zoom, the following resources are now available:

Project ReShare update and roadmap (slides)

ReShare Returnables 1.2 product demo (video 1)

ReShare Returnables discussion and lightning talks (video 2)

ReShare Returnables documentation (Confluence)

ReShare Returnables tools for local testing (GitHub)

News Release — Project ReShare Welcomes Minitex and Ann Arbor District Library

May 17, 2021

Project ReShare is pleased to welcome Minitex and the Ann Arbor District Library to the ReShare community. Current ReShare membership is available on the Project ReShare web site.

Minitex is a state-funded library organization based at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities that provides resource sharing and delivery to libraries of all types in Minnesota – school media centers, public and academic libraries, state agency and health science libraries.

Gerri Moeller, Associate Director for Resource Sharing and Delivery, explained the Minitex process for evaluating ReShare and deciding to apply for membership. “For the past few months, we have been meeting with representatives from Project ReShare, reviewing the documentation, discussing our needs for a future resource sharing system, and viewing demonstrations of the current state of the project,”  Moeller said. “We’re really intrigued with the possibilities, and excited to become a member of this project.” 

The Minitex MNLINK service allows any patron in the state to search a Minnesota instance of WorldCat, or extend that service out to the full WorldCat catalog, then directly place an unmediated request. Items from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities are filled, free of charge, by Minitex staff for any resident of the state. In 2020, Minitex delivered 732,000 items, referred almost 400,000 requests, and facilitated  over 250,000 direct patron requests.  Minitex provides many other services to libraries and cultural heritage institutions in Minnesota, including a robust statewide database, an online reference service, a statewide ebook collection, cooperative purchasing services, a statewide historical digitized collection, and a high-density storage facility. The organization is just wrapping up its four-year involvement in a project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to work with SimplyE. 

Among the Minitex contributions to Project ReShare are three years of financial support, participation on Project ReShare committees and teams, and staff expertise, especially in integration and deployment of SimplyE. 

The Ann Arbor District Library (AADL) serves approximately 160,000 residents in the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan and other parts of Washtenaw County. Its five locations are staffed by about 200 employees, including eight staff members in the information technology department. 

AADL has a long-standing commitment to information technology and open source software. It administers its own Evergreen instance and a “homegrown” catalog and integration built on Drupal and Elasticsearch. “AADL is deeply committed to open source and collaboratively developed software,” noted Eli Neiburger, Deputy Director of AADL. “We’re interested in open source alternatives to our current patron-initiated interload system. We want to support efforts to develop an open platform.”

AADL will be providing three years of financial support to the project.

Background

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.

Project ReShare Open Community Meeting May 2021

Project ReShare will hold a community meeting open to the public on Wednesday, May 26, 11:00-12:30 EST. Register here to attend.

Agenda (subject to slight revisions):

  1. ReShare Returnables 1.2 software demo
  2. Update on ReShare roadmap
  3. Community member lightning talks
    • Writing reports using the Library Data Platform (Sean Cwiek, MCLS)
    • VuFind development (Adam Olsen and Joel Marchesoni, Western Carolina University)
    • User experience and accessibility review (Matthew Reidsma, Grand Valley State University)
    • NCIP development (Michelle Suranofsky, Lehigh University)

There will be time for questions and discussion. Anyone interested in Project ReShare is welcomed to participate.

News Release — Project ReShare Membership Expands with Addition of Auraria Library, Stanford University Libraries, and the Western North Carolina Library Network

April 5, 2021

Project ReShare is pleased to announce three new members that increase the diversity of the project, both in types of organizations and geography — Auraria Library, Stanford University Libraries, and the Western North Carolina Library Network

Auraria Library, located in downtown Denver, serves three institutions of higher education on one campus: University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver), Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSU Denver), and Community College of Denver (CCD). Auraria Library serves a diverse population and supports various curricular and research programs. MSU Denver & CCD are Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) and 48% of CU Denver’s students identify as students of color. The vision of the Auraria campus when created in the 1970’s was one of consolidation and collaboration; a place where a student could attend community college, transfer to a 4-year college, and go on to earn a graduate degree all on the same campus. While that vision has changed over the years as each institution has carved out its own identity, the library continues to be one of the few shared resources and services. 

Auraria is actively striving to change the future of resource sharing. The SILLVR pilot project, launched in January 2020, is the first library-to-library streaming video borrowing project in the country. Auraria Library in collaboration with the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries secured streaming video partners to continue the project into 2021. The consortium also was chosen to partner with ProQuest to launch a new EBook ILL pilot in 2021. 

“Auraria Library cares deeply about equity of access to content, collaboration, and reimagining the future of ILL,” explained, Katy DiVittorio, Collections Strategies, Department Head. “This is one of our primary reasons for wanting to join Project ReShare.” Auraria is contributing financial resources, working group participation, and workflow expertise gained from SILLVR implementation.

Stanford Libraries has a tradition of commitment to open source tools, their development, and their communities, including work with Blacklight, IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework), and most recently in the resource sharing sphere of the Ivy Plus Library Confederation. Stanford Libraries appreciates the flexibility and scalability of the ReShare platform, notably its interoperability with a variety of integrated library systems and the plans for non-returnables and controlled digital lending, which will enable Stanford Libraries to work more efficiently with lending partners and consortia. 

The governance of Project ReShare also aligns with the values and culture of Stanford Libraries. “The shared governance model that enables community input and the focus of the project on usability from the very beginning offers an environment well suited to responding to our patrons’ changing resource sharing needs,” explained Hilary Thorsen, Resource Sharing Librarian. Stanford has recently become actively engaged with the FOLIO community and is interested in monitoring and contributing to potential synergies among the two projects.  

Stanford Libraries has made a three-year financial commitment to Project ReShare and plans to actively participate in working groups to help define and apply best practices, including possible integrations with Blacklight. 

The Western North Carolina Library Network (WNCLN) is a three-member consortium consisting of the western North Carolina academic institutions of Western Carolina University; the University of North Carolina, Asheville; and Appalachian State University. WNCLN currently shares an ILS (III Sierra), runs a book delivery service between the three institutions, jointly licenses shared e-resources, and shares professional expertise among staff. The Network has a long history of resource sharing and commitment to sharing collections and expertise and wants to expand that commitment to library users across the state of North Carolina and beyond.

Consortial resource sharing is a strategic priority for WNCLN and integral to two current endeavors — a shared print initiative with other UNC libraries and migration to a new library services platform. Project ReShare could serve as the technical infrastructure to provide streamlined resource sharing services between WNCLN, the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN), other NC universities, and other neighboring consortia. 

“The vision of Project ReShare aligns with the mission of WNCLN to foster active cooperation and collaboration among member libraries,” said Kristin Calvert, Head of Discovery and Technology Services, Western Carolina University. “We are eager to participate in this collaborative community and to contribute to its important work — work that is timely for us.”

Like Auraria Library and Stanford Libraries, WNCLN will contribute financially and also will provide staff for web development and VuFind development. Project ReShare enthusiastically welcomes these new members and their many contributions.

Background

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.

# # #

Media Contact

Lisa Croucher
Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN): trln.org, Executive Director
Project ReShare: projectreshare.org, Communication Team, Chair
info@projectreshare.org