By Bradley Kramer

Sitting in one of the stiff chairs in the library reference center, leaning close to a computer screen, hovering over the keyboard, Sara Price, a senior English major, pulls up the OhioLINK central catalog from the library home page.

Jittery from her “giant cup of coffee,” she erratically types a topic into the search menu as the blue hue from the screen makes opaque ovals of her glasses.

She is trying to find secondary sources for her final essay for her American literature class. She has already ordered one book through OhioLINK, and now she is trying to find more. Price likes searching the library system online rather than a card catalog like she had at her high school, she said.

“If they don’t have what I need here [at Kent], I’m not screwed, and I can find a variety of different materials on one subject, getting different perspectives,” Price said. “It makes research so much easier, and I don’t have to search 10 floors of the library to find what I need.”

Price requested three more books from OhioLINK: one from Cincinnati, one from the University of Akron and one from Bowling Green. The books will be at Kent in a couple days. She also printed an article from the Electronic Journal Center.

“I usually request as much as possible just in case some of the books don’t have anything I need,” Price said. “That’s the trick.”

Before 1992, if Price or any other student had to research a topic, he or she would have actually had to go to the library to find what they needed on one of the 12 floors through Kent’s electronic catalog. And, if the book were not on campus, students would have had to order what they needed through interlibrary loan, which would have taken two to three weeks. But OhioLINK changed all that. It changed the library drastically and permanently, library administrators say.

Though the form of what the library provides has changed, its goals are still the same: to connect students and faculty to information, said Jeff Gatten, assistant dean for collection management for Libraries and Media Services. Now students can search the library catalog and the OhioLINK central catalog through the Internet from anywhere. The central catalog includes the catalogs of 79 other academic libraries and across Ohio and the State Library.

And if a student needs a book that is not on campus, he or she can order it online, and it will arrive at Kent in to two to three days. OhioLINK is a cooperative effort between university libraries and the Ohio Board of Regents, the governmental body that allocates money to Ohio colleges and universities.

This year OhioLINK, the Ohio Library and Information Network, commences its tenth year of service. The OhioLINK central catalog, which now contains 98 research databases, was installed at Kent State in 1992, said Barbara Schloman, director of Libraries and Media Services.

Kent State was one of the first six universities to install the central catalog and was involved in its conception in 1987, which came after a recommendation for a statewide electronic catalog system. OhioLINK was responsible for bringing Web-based services to Kent State and other Ohio campuses in the mid-1990s, Schloman said. The Web changed everything.

“The Internet was there but not at all integrated,” Schloman said. “Most institutions were still mainframe-centered. It really broke the mold of what libraries were. Now, it’s all Web-based.”

OhioLINK also set up its own ground delivery system so that ordered materials would get where they needed to go faster than they would through interlibrary loan, Schloman said.

The real “jewel in the crown” of OhioLINK was the online requesting service, which had never been done, Schloman said. This feature was designed into the unique software the network used.

In 1990, OhioLINK chose Innovative Interfaces, Inc., to create the software for OhioLINK.

The software, called Dataware, is always being improved and is still one of the premier interfaces for providing scholarly information, said Tom Klingler, assistant dean of systems for Libraries and Media Services.

The software has to be able to decide from which institutions to borrow so that one was not affected more than another, Schloman said. Instead of having different interfaces for each database, the software was designed to use one interface to access all the databases, Klingler said. This standardization makes it easier for students and faculty to use because they don’t have to be trained on different systems.

The only time the standard interface is not used, is for the databases that OhioLINK connects the user to at a remote location and does not provide itself, Klingler said. With the ever advancing technology, OhioLINK is striving to improve how the system itself works, Klingler said.

“It is a fabulous environment for local control,” Klingler said.