Share Your Stuff
Share Your Stuff is the new Tenn-Share initiative to create a statewide catalog and establish a courier service for consortial borrowing. This project will expand all of our libraries’ resources and improve interlibrary loan operations considerably across the state.
Implementing the "Share Your Stuff" vision requires us to address these three issues:
- Discovery (state wide catalog)
- Requests & filling requests (streamlined proccesses)
- Rapid delivery of physical materials (courier, sorting, etc.)
The Tennessee Library Catalog
Most of Tennessee’s academic and larger public libraries, as well as many school libraries, already have their holdings in WorldCat. We hope more will join the group subscription Tenn-Share has in place.
Through the efforts of David Atkins at UT Knoxville, and Jack Stacy at the State Library, WorldCat and AutoGraphics, the ILL system used by all the public libraries outside the Metros, are now able to work together to enable ILL requests from both systems.
Regional successes:
InfoToGo: A resource-sharing network among Knox County public, school, and academic libraries, InfoToGo provides systems support, training, and courier services as a suite of services required for a model local resource sharing network.
East Tennessee's Shared Millennium Catalog: A resource-sharing network among Northeast State Technical Community College, East Tennessee State University and the Watauga Regional public libraries. Nearly 2 million items are available, with over 44,000 books transported by existing courier services last year.
Project Athena: The Nashville Area Library Alliance’s ILL program within a 50-mile radius of Nashville.
Statewide Success:
Currently East Tennessee State University and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, partner with Tennessee State Library and Archives-sponsored public libraries to provide interlibrary loans across the state. ETSU and UTK connect their holdings and interlibrary loan systems to the state’s Auto-Graphics network, making their collections freely available to Tennessee’s public libraries.
The Statewide Courier Service
Tenn-Share will be applying for a grant to begin planning for implementation of a statewide courier service. If you would like to be a part of the planning group, please contact Penny Frere.
Meanwhile, take a look at some other states that Share Their Stuff:
Texas – TexShare
Kentucy – KYVL, the Kentucky Virtual Library
Illinois – ILDS, Illinois Library Delivery Service