Library		A Newsletter of the Oberlin College Library
	Perspectives
	Number 13, September 1995

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City has awarded a grant in the amount of $840,000 to fund the development of a consortium of five Ohio liberal arts colleges in order to improve educational effectiveness and realize cost savings at participating institutions.

A major portion of the grant will support cooperation and resource sharing among the five libraries of Oberlin College, Denison University, Kenyon College, Ohio Wesleyan University, and the College of Wooster. Four of the five libraries (Denison, Kenyon, Ohio Wesleyan, and Wooster) will use the grant to develop an online shared library catalog linked by a dedicated telecommunications network. All five libraries will have access to electronic reference databases on a server to be located at Oberlin.

The electronic database project, which was funded by Mellon in the amount of $140,000, will allow the five college libraries to share database subscriptions at significantly lower cost. It is anticipated that the database server will have much faster response than the CD-ROM databases currently used by the five libraries, that it will have flexible search software, and that it will display periodical and serial holdings from both the OBIS system at Oberlin and the catalog shared by the other four institutions.

Project plans call for the shared catalog and the reference databases to be operational by the fall semester 1996. All five libraries will be participants in the OhioLINK statewide resource sharing system by that time.

Table of Contents Library Perspectives, no. 13

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