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Inside and Outside the Library
By howard | October 7, 2008
Fall is here. The thermometer fell to 40° last night and promises to do so again tonight; so it is time to go inside where it’s warm and cozy. Yet, autumn being the most delightful of seasons, it’s beautiful outside, and growing more so. Daily the leaves take on color and their fragrance permeates even the center of the city. The chill is crisp, making outside a refreshing place to be. Can it be that Fall has value both inside and out? Like a library?
Our libraries are inside. Each is a building or a part of a building made especially welcoming to any who come to learn or bring the kids to learn, to read, to get on the Internet, experience exhibits or programs, participate in community activities, seek the advice of reference librarians or readers’ advisors, or simply be part of the past and future of human culture that every library is. The library is a place – inside.
Increasingly, however, there is an outside of each library as well. From wherever an electronic connection can be made, many of the library’s tools and resources can be used just as they can from the inside. These are the databases, full text articles, e-books, digital collections of all kinds and other online resources that each library selects to meet the needs of its clientele. College and University library users have long provided their communities with access to databases and full text articles for research. RI’s public libraries offer e-books as well and a selection of databases and full text materials.
OLIS has long been working on creating a space in that outside-of-the-library that is everyone’s – a RI people’s park, if you will, where resources of wide interest can be accessible to anyone anywhere in RI. The first flower we planted in that park, AskRI is the online reference service provided to everyone in RI by the Statewide Reference Resource Center (SRRC) at the Providence Public Library under contract with OLIS. Monthly between 200 and 300 questions arrive at AskRI as emails or online chat sessions and are answered by the reference staff of the Providence Public Library. Questioners find AskRI in a link from the state’s web portal, ri.gov, or from a RI public library website.
Working in the park again this Summer, we set about cultivating a core collection of online resources to add to AskRI. For this effort, we are proud to have put together a consortium of consortia – HELIN, OSL, RILINK and the SRRC – that chose to plant access to Tutor.com, World Book and a selection of EBSCO databases in the AskRI park. The flowers are coming up now; check out the news on OLIS website www.olis.ri.gov to watch them grow and bloom.
The Statewide Reference Resource Center is established in RIGL 29-6 as a state grant to the Providence Public Library. OLIS and PPL annually negotiate a contract and program of service, available for view on the OLIS website www.olis.ri.gov. Special thanks are due this year to Dan Austin and Kathy Ellen Bullard of PPL and Karen Mellor of OLIS for their work hammering out the 2009 contract. Thanks are also due to the participants in the ‘consortium of consortia’ Bob Aspri of HELIN (RI’s Higher Education Library Information Network), Joan Gillespie of OSL (Ocean State Libraries), and Dorothy Frechette of RILINK (RI Library network for Kids).
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