From February 20-22, a diverse community of developers and technologists for libraries, museums, and archives congregated in San Jose, CA, for the Code4Lib 2019 conference. This annual event is an excellent opportunity to share ideas and foster collaboration surrounding open technologies.

This year, the conference program included presentations that highlighted two of TRLN’s high-priority collaborative efforts: the consortium’s new shared index, and Project ReShare.

On day 1 of the conference, Emily Lynema, Department Head of Information Technology at NC State and the TRLN Discovery Product Owner for NC State, gave a presentation titled “Consortial discovery and resource sharing: Making it happen with (mostly) standard tools.” You can watch a video recording of Emily’s presentation on the Code4Lib Youtube channel (starts at 52:29).

On day 2, Genia Kazymova, TRLN Applications Developer, presented a poster session about the architecture of the shared index. The poster, titled “Need a Shared Index? TRLN Discovery Project: Software and AWS Architecture Overview,” can be viewed here. Click here for the accompanying handout.

Finally, on day 3, Jill Morris of PALCI and Kristen Wilson of Index Data presented on the challenges and opportunities present in the current landscape of resource sharing, and Project ReShare’s vision for how to meet them. View the slide deck here or watch a video recording of the presentation here.

Thank you to all of these women for helping share these exciting stories of collaboration and innovation!

TRLN has announced that it will contribute financial support to Project ReShare, a community of library consortia, vendors, and service providers committed to an open approach to library resource sharing systems.

Project ReShare is building an open source, community-owned and managed, highly scalable library resource sharing platform and its accompanying software applications. A minimally viable product is expected to be delivered by Fall 2019 and will enable the discovery, management, and fulfillment of unmediated interlibrary loan requests. The Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc. (PALCI) and Index Data kickstarted construction of the platform with initial investments of funding and developer staff time, respectively. TRLN’s contribution of $6,400 matches the per library contribution previously committed by PALCI, and reflects the consortium’s desire to see alternative options and tools responsive to the strategic needs of the resource sharing community. This monetary contribution will further support the design and development of the platform by covering costs related to Project ReShare’s membership in the Open Library Foundation. The Open Library Foundation provides ReShare with collaborative infrastructure and a home for the project’s intellectual property, which will be made openly available under a permissive Apache 2.0 open source software license.

TRLN Executive Director Lisa Croucher reflects, “TRLN has been involved in ReShare since its inception, having contributed significant staff time and leadership to the project. We are pleased to now be able to make a more tangible commitment in the way of financial support as the project gains momentum. While resource sharing is a priority for most consortia, it is especially important for TRLN, due to the geographic proximity of our members and our long history of collaborative collection development.”

Project ReShare is led by a steering committee of representatives from Duke University Libraries, the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA), Index Data, Ivy Plus Libraries, Knowledge Integration, the Mozilla Foundation, the National Széchényi Library (Hungary), North Carolina State University Libraries, Northwestern University Libraries, the Open Library Foundation, PALCI, TRLN, the University of Chicago Library, the University of Houston, and the University of Pennsylvania.

For more information about Project ReShare, please visit https://projectreshare.org, or contact Jill Morris, Project ReShare Steering Committee Chair, at info@projectreshare.org.