The worsening state budget crisis has increased pressure on municipalities and government departments to consider consolidating services and sharing resources. Yet all the hand-wringing over cooperating just draws smiles from the men and women who run the state’s college and university libraries – because they have been doing it for years.
This year is the 25th anniversary of the Higher Education Library Information Network Consortium, known universally by its acronym, HELIN.
“Libraries were always cooperating – that’s what they did,” said Robert Aspri, who has been executive director of HELIN since it started in 1984. Librarians are “a different breed of people,” he added, and embrace cooperation easily.
HELIN is, first and foremost, a computerized card catalog that lists the holdings of 12 academic and 11 medical libraries in an Integrated Library System (ILS). It gives roughly 70,000 students access to more than 6 million items, from books and magazines to DVDs.
For example, a student at Bryant University in Smithfield can request a book from Salve Regina University in Newport, and will usually receive it within a day or two through a delivery service managed by the R.I. Office of Library and Information Services. Aspri said the HELIN libraries circulate about 52,000 items each year.
The collections also complement each other, with Providence College sending theology books to the University of Rhode Island and Bryant sharing business books with Salve. The consortium also allows the librarians to focus on acquiring materials that their partner institutions do not own.
In addition to borrowing privileges, the libraries also use HELIN to purchase products such as academic journals jointly, often at a discount of 15 to 20 percent. The libraries share 260 electronic resources, which account for much of the consortium’s $4.6 million annual budget.
“HELIN really … brings all the academic libraries in Rhode Island together,” said Mary Moroney, director of library services at Bryant and current president of HELIN’s board. “No library can stand alone. We all need each other to support all the research that’s going on in the state.”
It also provides a forum for library directors and other staff members to share information. “It keeps everyone stronger – no one is in a silo,” Moroney said.
HELIN started in 1984, when the library directors at URI, Rhode Island College and the Community College of Rhode Island decided to pool their resources to buy an automated circulation system, which Aspri said was a “pioneering” idea. Roger Williams University joined next, followed by Providence College and Johnson & Wales, Salve, Bryant and Brown universities. In 2005, the consortium expanded into Massachusetts with the addition of Wheaton College in Norton.
The system used by HELIN was developed by Innovative Interfaces, an Emoryville, Calif.-based company whose software also powers the Ocean State Libraries Catalog familiar to public library patrons in Rhode Island. (A third statewide system, RILINK, connects 96 secondary school libraries.) A server called InRhode connects the main HELIN system with Josiah, the catalog developed by Brown before it joined HELIN, and the medical libraries.
Brown, which doubled HELIN’s resources when it joined in 2002, is also a special case because students from the other schools are not allowed to access the inside of the university’s libraries as they can elsewhere.
HELIN is set to get a new collection in July with the addition of the R.I. Supreme Court’s State Law Library, though it also lost members when medical libraries were closed at the R.I. Department of Health and the Naval Ambulatory Health Center in Newport.
Aspri said he expects more libraries to join HELIN over time. “I get calls the time,” he said. “We get to be very popular in the library world. We are kind of a success story.” •
For additional information about the HELIN Library Consortium, visit www.helin.uri.edu.
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