Roselle Public Library District to join SWAN Consortium
The Roselle Public Library District has been awarded a $32,755.93 grant by the Reaching Across Illinois Library System, in a wave of grants awarded to six libraries in northern and central Illinois to join shared catalogs, including: Glenside Public Library District and Warrenville Public Library District who are joining SWAN together with Roselle.
Libraries choose to join shared catalogs, or consortium, to provide their patrons with access to materials from all the libraries in the consortium.
This benefits patrons by allowing them to search thousands more titles and have those titles delivered by RAILS to the patron's home library.
Illinois library patrons share more than 18 million items annually, greatly broadening the number of catalog items available to an individual library user.
"The Roselle Public Library is looking forward to offering expanding resources from across the Chicago suburbs to our residents and cardholders, while offsetting the costs of catalog software and maintenance we currently incur as a stand-alone library," said Executive Director Samantha Johnson.
SWAN (System Wide Automated Network) Library Services is a consortium founded in 1974 that currently boasts over 90 member libraries in the Chicago area, including Roselle's neighboring libraries in Bloomingdale and Itasca.
SWAN offers a shared online public access catalog with nearly 10 million items available to patrons of member libraries.
Roselle Public Library users will have access to this unique collection that includes materials from public, college, and special libraries across Illinois.
Illinois is a leader nationally in promoting the sharing of library resources and this grant helps libraries benefit their users with state-of-the-art technology and the necessary support for that technology.
The Roselle Public Library District serves Roselle and parts of Schaumburg, Medinah, Keeneyville, and Bloomingdale.
More information about the library is available at rosellepld.org.
Patrons of the Roselle Public Library will be able to access SWAN beginning the end of 2020.