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This paper aims to provide an update to Tom Sanville’s 2007 overview of OhioLINK, a renowned US academic library consortium, and describe the current state of activity and services.

The approach used is descriptive.

OhioLINK’s main collaborative services include document delivery, resource sharing and the establishment of digital libraries, including electronic journals, electronic books and open-access materials such as electronic theses and dissertations. This update to Tom Sanville’s 2007 overview of OhioLINK issues and developments describes the current state of collaborative library services and resource sharing a decade later, including the challenges of hosted institutional repositories and the implications of shifting from shared print to e-book collections at the network level.

OhioLINK trends provide a snapshot of changing activity and sustainability in library resource sharing at network scale across many different types of academic libraries.

Since 1992, when OhioLINK’s central catalog was first implemented, the consortium’s union listing and serials holdings activities have shifted from an emphasis on print holdings in individual libraries for traditional inter‐library lending to dealing with holdings for electronic serials purchased with group licenses and with related issues for linking catalog records, abstracting and indexing data. Current work centers on using one record or separate records for multiple versions of a serial (especially print and electronic), the most comprehensible display for resources owned by the consortium as a group instead of by separate libraries, information about and display of holdings information for the electronic version of serials, and consistent metadata.

Since 1992, when OhioLINK’s central catalog was first implemented, the consortium’s union listing and serials holdings activities have shifted from an emphasis on print holdings in individual libraries for traditional inter‐library lending to dealing with holdings for electronic serials purchased with group licenses and with related issues for linking catalog records, abstracting and indexing data. Current work centers on using one record or separate records for multiple versions of a serial (especially print and electronic), the most comprehensible display for resources owned by the consortium as a group instead of by separate libraries, information about and display of holdings information for the electronic version of serial, and consistent metadata.

Non‐mediated, patron‐initiated inter‐library loan recently became a new component of OhioLINK, a consortium of Ohio academic libraries in both the public and private sectors ranging from major research institutions to community colleges. “Inter‐institutional lending” is used in this article to denote the process by which Miami University Libraries' patrons request items from other OhioLINK libraries. Pre‐implementation speculation, post‐implementation experiences, and control mechanisms showcase how “inter‐institutional lending” is leading to Ohio's dream of a virtual library.

Are library consortia agile organizations? That is, do they have the leadership capacity to respond quickly to or drive change in complex environments? To explore the related issues of library consortium agility and leadership, the author developed a case study of the Ohio Private Academic Libraries (referred to hereafter as OPAL) consortium, 1998–2007. This chapter describes the OPAL experience and summarizes her findings, conclusions, and recommendations.

While the primary reason for a library’s collections is their use as widely and broadly as possible, the issues clustered around interlibrary lending are central to redefining what libraries will be in the twenty‐first century. Discusses interlibrary lending among OhioLINK libraries ‐ a consortium of all libraries located in Ohio‐based colleges and universities. It describes OhioLINK and talks about how both the sharing of books and the sharing of articles are being tackled. It concludes with how some interesting changes in traditional interlibrary loan thinking are changing the way in which libraries are being envisioned generally in Ohio.

It should come as no surprise that the 1993 EDU‐COM conference in Cincinnati, Ohio, showcased one of North America's most interesting experiments in automation—Ohio's OhioLINK. Unusual in this conference, traditionally focused on technical issues, was the focus on OhioLINK as representative of new politics, a new funding strategy, and a new library paradigm, rather than OhioLINK described in terms of mips, routers, and bandwidth.

OhioLINK, a consortium of Ohio academic libraries in both the public and the private sector ranging from major research institutions to community colleges, is one of the nation's first major attempts to create a virtual, statewide library system. More than just linking the holdings of participating libraries within the context of a 48‐hour delivery system for books and journal articles, OhioLINK provides the platform as well for the statewide delivery of commercial and other databases, Gopher Internet access, and experimentation with the development and testing of new information tools. OhioLINK also represents an intriguing and creative approach to state funding and automated system design. In terms of bold imagination and cooperative power, OhioLINK follows in the footsteps of that other major Ohio institution, OCLC.

The aim of the paper is to describe the development of OhioLINK – a world famous US consortium – and the issues that it currently faces as well as its responses.

The paper employs a descriptive approach.

The paper suggests that information use simply breeds more information use, and OhioLINK contributes to its users' educational activities through access to and use of the documents and information resources which it supplies. It provides a set of priorities and initiatives for consideration

The paper provides valuable insights into the workings of a leading resource sharing consortium of libraries.

This paper aims to describe work at Kent State University Libraries and Media Services to promote and devise electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) storage at OhioLINK's ETD Center, to find efficient methods to represent these unique scholarly materials within the library's catalog, and to foster the establishment of state‐wide library catalog standards for ETDs.

A semi‐automated process has been devised that extracts student‐supplied metadata already available in the OhioLINK ETD Center to provide almost instantaneous access to unique resources through the library catalog. A Perl program uses the OAI‐PMH protocol to extract metadata, modifies and enhances the data, and inserts it into the Innovative Interfaces, Inc. catalog. Significant effort was made to map the data from ETD‐MS to MARC. Catalogers retrieve records for completion and contribute full bibliographic records to OCLC WorldCat in addition to the local and consortium catalogs.

The process successfully produces a provisional bibliographic record that is useful immediately for resource discovery and that can serve as the basis for full cataloging.

This research provides libraries with a method they can adapt locally to provide provisional level access, full level access, or both, to unique scholarly research.

This research broke new ground regarding the use of a software agent to repurpose metadata in library catalogs. It also impacted national cataloging standards for ETDs.