Ohio Academic Libraries Now Provide 10 Million Unique Titles

This month The Ohio State University Libraries added the 10 millionth unique title to the OhioLINK Library Catalog. Of these 10 million unique titles, 58.75% are owned by only one OhioLINK member library. Muskingum College students, faculty, and staff now have access to a total of 45.5 million copies of books and other library materials. To visualize how many items that is, imagine a bookshelf that stretches from Columbus to Portland, Maine. That would be 878 miles of shelf space, just twenty miles short of the amount needed to accommodate all 45.5 million items.

Ohio students and faculty borrowed 769,000 items from other OhioLINK libraries from October 2005 through September 2006. More than 6.3 million books and other library items have been requested since Ohio academic libraries began offering online borrowing and delivery through OhioLINK in 1994.

OhioLINK has grown from its beginnings in the early 1990s as a shared statewide catalog and online borrowing system to a robust virtual library of 7.5 million scholarly journal articles, 19,000 electronic books, 2,000 digital videos and more. These items are accessible online 24 hours a day, seven days a week at www.ohiolink.edu and the Library's website. Use of these resources remains high. In the past 12 months, OhioLINK users have downloaded 4.9 million scholarly articles, used more than 188,000 e-books, and downloaded or streamed educational digital videos 68,415 times.