COLUMBUS, Ohio (February 9, 2018) – With the objective of creating a modern and simple digital user experience for students, faculty, and researchers, OhioLINK announced today the selection of BiblioBoard as the technology platform for its shared e-book collections.
BiblioBoard, created by BiblioLabs, is an award-winning, e-content delivery platform that delivers all pieces of a digital library in a single user interface (e-books, audio, videos, historical materials, etc.). The platform is built for simplicity and ease of use for the modern user and supports bookmarking, taking notes, storing favorites, and an app for use on Android and iOS.
“This is a much-needed modernization of a legacy e-book platform,” OhioLINK Executive Director Gwen Evans said. “More than 160,000 e-books will now be easily accessible remotely and on devices, which is crucial for the way our members interact with and use information.”
Accessible to more than 600,000 OhioLINK users through its 120 academic and research member libraries, the e-book collection is also used for course materials in classroom instruction at no cost to students. One of the first library consortia in the nation to build a shared collection of high-quality, scholarly e-books, OhioLINK’s collection is available to member institutions at a significant size and discount over what members could afford on their own.
“OhioLINK is an industry leader and we appreciate greatly the confidence they have shown in our technology and our vision for the future of libraries,” said BiblioBoard CEO Mitchell Davis. “Everyone is looking for a simple and effective digital user experience that crosses mobile elegantly and exceeds user expectations. We have proven the impact we can have in higher ed learning environments, and we intend to make this partnership a role model for how vendors and consortia can work collaboratively to achieve that goal in a sustainable way.”
Over the past two years, BiblioBoard has been involved with a number of important academic e-content initiatives, including supporting an industry-leading, Jisc-funded Open Educational Resources (OER) textbook project pilot at the University of Liverpool, and deploying cloud libraries for a number of leading open access projects such as Knowledge Unlatched and the Public Library of Science (PLOS), among others. The BiblioBoard platform currently hosts more than 30,000 open access resources and OER textbooks that are made free as part of the BiblioBoard platform.
About OhioLINK
Established in 1992, the Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK) is Ohio’s statewide academic library consortium and serves more than 600,000 end users. A member of the Ohio Technology Consortium of the Ohio Department of Higher Education, OhioLINK provides a competitive advantage for Ohio’s higher education community by cooperatively and cost-effectively acquiring, providing access to and preserving an expanding array of print and digital resources, and by centrally hosting digital content. Together, OhioLINK and its member libraries provide users access to nearly 50 million books and other library materials, more than 100 electronic research databases, more than 81,000 e-books, thousands of images and videos, and millions of electronic journal articles. www.ohiolink.edu.
About BiblioLabs
BiblioLabs is a leader in Open Education Resource (OER) and OA content creation, curation, and distribution software to academic institutions. Based in Charleston, South Carolina, BiblioLabs’ BiblioBoard platform aims to transform student and researcher access to information by delivering a simple, intuitive and modern user experience and delivering the best OER and OA content creation tools. BiblioLabs works with public and academic institutions of all sizes to democratize access to information and lower costs for students. https://biblioboard.com/openaccess
