it also offers joint membership with leisure centres, promoting the idea of “active in mind and body”, and thereby supporting the health agenda. In addition, it has the potential to become a cultural access card through further collaboration with the Bristol Old Vic Theatre. The card is sustained through shared data between the systems and a shared approach to marketing. South Western Regional Library Service (SWRLS) The Open Doors project was made possible through the success of a bid for funding to the South Western Regional Library Service (SWRLS). This organisation includes libraries from a range of sectors across the south west of England ranging from Gloucestershire in the north to Cornwall, Dorset and Channel Islands in the south and Swindon in the east. objectives are, through co-operation, interlending and joint training, to promote the principle of community education. When SWRLS was established in 1937 the focus was on interlending, but this activity has been dropping over the past few years, and the focus is now much more on joint training and development initiatives and sharing of resources, where possible. The most recent strategic plan has identified the following as the current priorities: to raise the profile of SWRLS; to demonstrate value for money; to provide project funding; to encourage partnership working, resource-sharing and collaborative collection development. Over the past four years SWRLS has mediated a grant scheme to encourage collaborative projects between members in support of its objectives. The UWE guest (walk-in) access to e-resources (Holmes, 2012) was a previous recipient of such funding, working with higher and further education libraries in the region to audit and raise awareness of which academic libraries offered access, to which resources, and how. This was partly the result of requests from public libraries who were being asked by independent researchers how to access scholarly journals. The project offering Approach and objectives The overall purpose of the Open Doors project was to investigate, pilot and evaluate joint membership between a public library service and a university library. This involved exploring the joint use of cards without merging membership databases but using the barcode as the common access point. The project evaluated the impact of reciprocal borrowing and identified which considerations needed to be addressed to facilitate such a scheme, e.g. in terms of policy and practice. The project team bid for £5,000 of funding which paid for a member of staff to work part time, fixed term on the project, and also provided funds for promotion of the initiative.
it also offers joint membership with leisure centres, promoting the idea of “active in mind and body”, and thereby supporting the health agenda. In addition, it has the potential to become a cultural access card through further collaboration with the Bristol Old Vic Theatre. The card is sustained through shared data between the systems and a shared approach to marketing. South Western Regional Library Service (SWRLS) The Open Doors project was made possible through the success of a bid for funding to the South Western Regional Library Service (SWRLS). This organisation includes libraries from a range of sectors across the south west of England ranging from Gloucestershire in the north to Cornwall, Dorset and Channel Islands in the south and Swindon in the east. objectives are, through co-operation, interlending and joint training, to promote the principle of community education. When SWRLS was established in 1937 the focus was on interlending, but this activity has been dropping over the past few years, and the focus is now much more on joint training and development initiatives and sharing of resources, where possible. The most recent strategic plan has identified the following as the current priorities: to raise the profile of SWRLS; to demonstrate value for money; to provide project funding; to encourage partnership working, resource-sharing and collaborative collection development. Over the past four years SWRLS has mediated a grant scheme to encourage collaborative projects between members in support of its objectives. The UWE guest (walk-in) access to e-resources (Holmes, 2012) was a previous recipient of such funding, working with higher and further education libraries in the region to audit and raise awareness of which academic libraries offered access, to which resources, and how. This was partly the result of requests from public libraries who were being asked by independent researchers how to access scholarly journals. The project offering Approach and objectives The overall purpose of the Open Doors project was to investigate, pilot and evaluate joint membership between a public library service and a university library. This involved exploring the joint use of cards without merging membership databases but using the barcode as the common access point. The project evaluated the impact of reciprocal borrowing and identified which considerations needed to be addressed to facilitate such a scheme, e.g. in terms of policy and practice. The project team bid for £5,000 of funding which paid for a member of staff to work part time, fixed term on the project, and also provided funds for promotion of the initiative.
Open%20Doors%20project_revised%2011%20March%202015_post%20print%20%281%29.docx