SHARES 2021

The SHARES Executive Group will be focusing time and effort on three themes and one activity throughout 2021 that we hope will bring benefit to the consortium and to the entire resource sharing community.

The topics are:

• Accessibility of ILL materials 
• Building resource sharing skill sets
• Advocating for resource sharing
• Lending e-books

The Executive Group will engage with SHARES participants around each topic in turn, beginning with Accessibility.

In December 2019, the Executive Group conducted a survey of SHARES members seeking information about current practice, preferences and aspirations around making interlibrary loan materials accessible. The results of the survey were presented during a virtual session (You will be prompted to login to the OCLC Community Center.) of the OCLC Resource Conference Web series in August 2020 and will form the basis for our work in 2021.

Accessibility is a huge topic with many parts, including:

• Americans with Disabilities Act compliance
• Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
• Providing all material in accessible formats   

The Executive Group proposes that SHARES participants join with us and with peers in other resource sharing consortia to work toward making all materials shared across our resource sharing networks universally accessible as a standard practice.   

There is widespread interest across the ILL community, and important work is already being done in this area.  Accessibility was a hot topic at both the 2019 and 2020 OCLC Resource Sharing Conferences and at many other gatherings, including a 2019 BTAA conference.   

SHARES can contribute to universal accessibility for ILL materials in a number of ways:

• By gathering and sharing information about current practice and available technology.
• By working to establish standards and best practices.
• By adding our collective voice to those advocating for making OCR’d ILL materials routine rather than the exception.

We look to you for your ideas,  expertise and questions!