Affiliations & Projects
[Co-Founder, 1999]
GWLA Staff Roles:
Joni Blake: BioOne Board, Secretary
BioOne
BioOne is a nonprofit publisher that aims to make scientific research more accessible through a portfolio of products, including its full-text aggregation BioOne Complete. Established in 1999 by five founding organizations—the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), The University of Kansas, the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA), and Allen Press, Inc.—BioOne serves a community of over 150 society and institutional publishers, 1,400 subscribing institutions, and millions of researchers worldwide.
[Supporting Organization since 2023]
Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project
Networks of libraries have a long tradition of working together to expand their resources and provide more comprehensive coverage across all subjects through sharing of resources. As one of these strategies, larger networks of institutions have recently explored wider adoption of cooperative collections management, which this project defines as a process by which networks of institutions work collaboratively to acquire, manage, circulate, and preserve collections across the network. The CCLP seeks to overcome serious barriers to wider implementations, including the lack of available vendor-neutral interoperable systems, adequate governance and decision-making frameworks, and assessment tools.
The NISO Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Infrastructure Project (CCLIP) Recommended Practice will document exchange protocols that describe gathering, normalizing, and exchanging holdings information, contractual information, retention obligations, and usage data. It will also describe aggregation of library staff and subject matter expertise, local and group-based insights, and the publisher/marketplace information necessary to support collaborative decisions at the local and cross-institutional levels.
[Member since 1999]
International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC)
The International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) is an informal, self-organized group currently comprising approximately 200 library consortia in North and South America, Europe, Australia, Asia, and Africa. The member consortia serve all types and sizes of libraries. ICOLC supports participating consortia by facilitating discussion on issues of common interest. Twice per year ICOLC conducts meetings dedicated to keeping participating consortia informed about new electronic information resources, pricing practices of electronic information providers and vendors, and other issues of importance to directors, governing boards, and libraries of consortia. From time to time ICOLC also issues statements regarding topics which affect libraries and library consortia.
[Member since 2021]
Library Accessibility Alliance
The Library Accessibility Alliance is a program seeking to ensure all library users have equitable access to information. The Alliance has contracts with two accessibility consulting companies (Deque and Usability/Accessibility Research & Consulting, or UARC, from Michigan State University) for them to perform high-level, meaning not entirely comprehensive, accessibility evaluations based on WCAG 2.1 AA. The consulting companies are given a designated number of hours for the evaluations and are intended to identify some, but not all, accessibility issues/barriers.
The LAA selects typically two vendors a month and submits scoping documents (example scoping document) to Deque and UARC. The scoping document outlines typical library e-resource tasks a user might perform (basic and advanced searching, viewing search results, applying filters and refining results, viewing individual items, etc).
[Member since 2020]
Open Education Network
The Open Education Network is "an alliance of higher education institutions, systems and consortia moving open education forward."
As stated in the OEN Guiding Principles, "We, the members of the Open Education Network (OEN), commit to working together to make open the default in higher education. When we advance open education locally and collectively, we empower faculty, remove barriers to education, and enhance student success."
[Member since 2023]
OpenRS
OpenRS is a heterogeneous resource sharing system that is ILS and Discovery agnostic and accommodates the full spectrum of mediated and unmediated resource sharing.
OpenRS acts upon a “consortia first” mentality, striving to provide libraries with the tools needed for robust and extended functionality for resource sharing. The project will focus on developing and implementing software systems, protocols, and best practices that foster collaboration and support various library services, including seamless unmediated intra-consortial borrowing functionality and expanded sharing across multiple consortia. The software will provide a containerized code base configured for ease of deployment, maintenance, and upgrades. Libraries and consortia can choose to host the service locally or with a third party.
[Member since 2018]
Project ReShare
"The ReShare Community is a group of libraries, consortia, information organizations, and developers, with both commercial and non-commercial interests, who came together in 2018 to create Project ReShare – a new and open approach to library resource sharing systems.
"The ReShare Community has a bold vision for building a user-centered, app-based, community-owned resource sharing platform for libraries to set the standard for how we connect library patrons to the resources and information they require."
[Pilot Project Sponsorship, 2005-2010]
Technical Report Archive & Image Library (TRAIL)
The Technical Report Archive & Image Library (TRAIL) identifies, acquires, catalogs, digitizes and provides unrestricted access to U.S. government agency technical reports. TRAIL currently consists of over four dozen member institutions whose annual membership fees and volunteered staff time further the efforts of the project.
A summary of the history of TRAIL, including GWLA in-kind and financial contributions to the project, may be found on the History of TRAIL website.
[Pilot Project Sponsorship, 2001-2015]
Western Waters Digital Library
The Western Waters Digital Library (WWDL) provides free public access to a wide range of significant resources on water in the Western United States. Available resources include classic water literature, legal transcripts, maps, reports, personal papers, water project records, photographs, audio recordings, videos, and other material. The WWDL also includes selected collection guides. These guides, also known as finding aids, describe a collection’s content, significance, and relevance to a particular research topic.
The WWDL began as a collaborative regional project created by twelve research libraries from eight western states under the auspices of the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA). Funding for the WWDL has been provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).