Historical Background
In 1967, the presidents of Ohio colleges and universities founded the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC) to develop a computerized system through which the libraries of Ohio academic institutions could share resources and reduce costs. As OCLC became a national leader in supplying services to libraries, it became obvious that another mechanism was needed to meet the needs of Ohio libraries. In December 1977, OHIONET was established as the first OCLC regional service provider to broker OCLC services in Ohio. OHIONET became a 501(c)3 not for profit corporation in September 1978 and moved to its current administrative offices in 1981 to allow for a growing staff and changing mission.
OHIONET membership has grown from 103 libraries in 1977 to more than 300 in 2004. Member libraries include academic, public, school, and special libraries, library consortia, and a library association, and are located in Ohio, West Virginia, and western Pennsylvania. Brokering OCLC services is still an important function, but OHIONET now offers an array of services to meet the needs of members. Those services include:
- Continuing education programs on OCLC products and services, reference databases, and library trends and issues
- Discount programs for electronic resources, equipment and supplies
- Hosted technology solutions, including web hosting and proxy hosting
- OPAL, a shared library catalog of Ohio's private academic libraries
- Web design
The OCLC Online Computer Library Center is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing information costs. More than 50,540 libraries in 84 countries and territories around the world use OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend and preserve library materials. Researchers, students, faculty, scholars, professional librarians and other information seekers use OCLC services to obtain bibliographic, abstract and full-text information when and where they need it. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the OCLC Online Union Catalog.
