Ex Libris®, a ProQuest company, has announced that the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) has selected the Ex Libris Alma® cloud-based library services platform to support the I-Share framework, which will enhance services and expand collaboration among participating institutions.
I-Share serves 91 CARLI member institutions, including three ARL members: Southern Illinois University Carbondale, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which has the largest public university library in the US. I-Share libraries include all Illinois public universities, 47 Illinois private colleges and universities, 26 Illinois community colleges, and research libraries including the Illinois State Library, the Newberry Library, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.
I-Share supports resource sharing and collection management functions, including circulation, cataloguing, acquisitions, serials control, course reserves, and reporting. Leveraging the Alma platform, I-Share participating libraries will each have an online catalogue of their own collection as well as a merged, unified catalogue of the holdings of all I-Share libraries, thus facilitating resource sharing among participating libraries.
Alma library services will replace CARLI's implementation of the Ex Libris Voyager® integrated library system and SFX OpenURL link resolver. In addition, the Ex Libris Primo® solution will provide I-Share libraries with a discovery interface and a central index of metadata that can direct a user to resources licensed by the user's library or by the consortium.
As a collective, CARLI adds value to member libraries of all types and sizes by enabling the libraries to share costs, collections, expertise, programs, products, and services. Participating CARLI libraries will use the Alma platform and Primo solution to unify the management of print resources and e-resource licenses; share data, collaborate more efficiently, and streamline workflows. Furthermore, cross-institution analytics will assist the consortium in assessing system-wide resource sharing, collection development, and usage of collection resources, all in support of data-driven decisions.
I-Share currently has more than 14 million unique bibliographic records representing over 38 million items. During 2018, the I-Share libraries filled nearly 300,000 I-Share resource sharing loans to patrons of other I-Share libraries.
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