Bethel College and Saint Mary’s College join the PALNI Consortium and the PALNI group OCLC WorldShare Management Services

The Private Academic Library Network of Indiana Inc (PALNI) is excited to announce the addition of two institutions, Bethel College (Mishawaka, IN) and Saint Mary’s College (Notre Dame, IN), to the PALNI family. Bethel College and Saint Mary’s College join a highly engaged and collaborative group of private college and seminary libraries across the state bringing the number of supported institutions up to twenty-four. PALNI uses OCLC’s WorldShare Management Services (WMS) to provide direct, unmediated access to the collective collections of all the institutions without the need to export or import records. OCLC is also continuing development in WMS to support collaboration in analytics, licensing, and more.

“The PALNI board discussion on the applications from Saint Mary’s College and Bethel College was enthusiastic," says PALNI Executive Director Kirsten Leonard. All of us in PALNI and PALNI-supported schools look forward to combining their strengths with the many experts and leaders across PALNI. Their request to join PALNI’s Deep Collaboration speaks highly of PALNI’s ability to produce services and collections together that rival much larger consortia and institutions and their inclusion will make us stronger.

The PALNI board of directors has committed to deep collaboration between PALNI institutions, providing better service by sharing resources to reduce duplication and fuel innovation. Â New expertise from both schools will aid the consortium to increase collaboration efforts and enhance traditional services. Bethel College and Saint Mary’s College will have access to over 200 colleagues and support staff from the other PALNI schools, a cost-efficient contract with OCLC for the WorldShare Management Services, a consortia-wide resource-sharing program called PALShare, an instructional technology collaboration, affordable education initiatives, and a host of other services that continue to grow to meet the new needs of our students and faculty.

“We are looking forward to the peer-based support from experienced librarians at libraries like ours: small, largely undergraduate libraries that face similar challenges and limitations but also have similar degrees of flexibility,” comments Saint Mary’s College Interim Director Catherine Pellegrino. “We are excited about joining an organization where we will be equal collaborators on projects and where we’ll be challenged to develop and share our own expertise for the benefit of the whole cooperative consortium.”

“We are excited to partner with the member libraries of PALNI,” remarks Bethel College Library Director Mark Root. “It will be a great opportunity for us to work with institutions that are liked minded and facing similar challenges. By partnering we will be able to expand our services and resources to our community and the PALNI community.”

“The institution’s librarians and their patrons will benefit from the consortium’s contract with OCLC’s WorldShare Management Services. OCLC has been closely collaborating with Kirsten Leonard, PALNI Executive Director, and the PALNI consortium since the group selected WMS as their cloud-based library services platform in 2013. More recently, we collaborated with several PALNI libraries to develop and pilot the new Digby mobile app to ensure that it delivered the right experience and simplified their libraries’ work. Their input was invaluable in making this app user-friendly for their student workers. As we continue to enhance WMS to ensure it meets the needs of libraries and library groups into the future, we look forward to continuing to partner with PALNI and its newest members, Bethel College and Saint Mary’s College,” said Mary Sauer-Games, OCLC Vice President, Global Product Management.

The PALNI institutions are looking forward to meeting their new colleagues and bringing them onboard fully this spring. “Bethel College and Saint Mary’s College are ideal partners for PALNI,” shares PALNI Board Chair-Elect and Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary Library Director Karl Stutzman. “Our track record of collaboration addresses a central challenge in higher education: the need to contain educational costs while providing increasingly sophisticated services. Adding well-aligned members like Saint Mary’s and Bethel will increase all PALNI institutions’ return on investment.”

About Saint Mary’s College:

Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Ind., is a four-year, Catholic, residential, women's liberal arts college offering five bachelor's degrees and more than 30 major areas of study, such as business, nursing, art, chemistry, and social work. Saint Mary's College also offers two graduate degrees: a Master of Science and a Doctorate. All programs that fall under these degrees are co-educational and include a Master of Science in Data Science, a Master of Science in Speech Language Pathology, and a Doctorate of Nursing Practice. Founded in 1844 by the Sisters of the Holy Cross, Saint Mary's College seeks, according to its mission statement, to educate students, develop their talents, and prepare them to make a difference in the world.

About Bethel College:

Bethel College is a Christian liberal arts college that that offers both baccalaureate and master's degrees in a wide variety of disciplines and areas of study. Bethel has as its mission to be a Christian community of learners dedicated to building lives of commitment for leadership in the Church and the world. In order to achieve this mission, Bethel provides liberating academic and co-curricular programs to challenge the mind, enlarge the vision and equip the whole person for lifelong service.

About PALNI:

The Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI) is a 501(c)(3) owned by the twenty-four supported private academic institutions. The founding concept of PALNI is to collaborate to enhance teaching and learning through optimizing library resources and services. PALNI collaborates not only with other private academic institutions in Indiana, but also with other groups and consortia to reduce costs and compete academically through innovative services. Information management systems and sharing expertise in many areas including strategic planning, reference, information fluency, outreach, data management and configuration, scholarly communication, and instructional technology are just a few examples of our collaborations.

About OCLC and WorldShare Management Services:

OCLC is a nonprofit global library cooperative providing shared technology services, original research and community programs so that libraries can better fuel learning, research and innovation. Through OCLC, member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the most comprehensive global network of data about library collections and services. Libraries gain efficiencies through OCLC's WorldShare, a complete set of library management applications and services built on an open, cloud-based platform. It is through collaboration and sharing of the world's collected knowledge that libraries can help people find answers they need to solve problems. Together as OCLC, member libraries, staff and partners make breakthroughs possible.