Last week was a historic one for MLC. On Tuesday, the membership voted 68-1 to combine with INCOLSA, and the following day the INCOLSA membership approved the same resolution 153-29. We are grateful for the overwhelmingly positive votes and are eager to begin working together as the Midwest Collaborative for Library Services. MCLS will officially …Read more »

The International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) has issued a new document, Statement on the Global Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Consortial Licenses. MLC has been active with ICOLC for many years and is one of the signatories to the statement. Libraries all around the world are feeling the pinch of the global financial …Read more »

MLC’s delegates to OCLC’s Members Council have prepared an analysis of OCLC’s recently announced new policy on transfer and use of WorldCat records. Greetings! As your elected delegates to OCLC Members Council, we wanted to draw your immediate attention to the major changes that OCLC has made to its Policy for Use and Transfer of …Read more »

At MLC’s annual meeting on October 3, I talked about the changes that our OCLC members will experience with the new service model that OCLC announced a couple weeks ago. If you work in a library that uses any OCLC service, the new service model will have an impact on you, and it will affect …Read more »

Last Friday, 85 folks from MLC member libraries and staff gathered at Lansing Community College’s West Campus to hear about community-building activities in libraries. Chrystie Hill got the day off with an enthusiastic talk about the work libraries are doing to build a greater sense of community. Her thesis is that libraries are not just …Read more »

We are happy and proud to announce that Ruth has been selected to be an ALA Copyright Scholar. The ALA Office for Information Technology Policy has chosen the Copyright Scholars for this year, and Ruth is one of eight new scholars. For the next two years, Ruth will devote a portion of her time to …Read more »

On and off over the past several years, I have fielded questions about whether MLC was interested in running a shared integrated library system. Up to now, we have declined to offer such a service. Lately the questions have become more numerous and with the added twist of whether we would consider running Evergreen, the …Read more »