Welcome to SHARE

Spring is an excellent time to refresh and clean up our bibliographic and item records. Below are reminders and updates to help us maintain our “SHARE”d catalog.

SHARE member invoices will be sent via email in July from finance@illinoisheartland.org. Please contact Cassandra Thompson if you need to update your email address or add a contact for billing. 

Maximize your users' experience!

For the past year, SHARE committees have been reviewing new technologies, including something called a “discovery layer,” which would integrate with Polaris and replace our existing Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC), PowerPAC. After careful review, the SHARE Circulation & Resource Sharing Committee determined that Aspen Discovery, from ByWater Solutions, would be the best fit for our member libraries that want to add this new technology.

Reservations for Aspen are closed at this time. If you are interested, please Cassandra Thompson for further information and options. 

SHARE has a new help desk system! You can access our help desk from the SHARE website under the Support menu, by bookmarking the URL https://help.illinoisheartland.org/, or by emailing us at help@illinoisheartland.org.

Are your patrons looking for ways to access both popular and obscure titles digitally? Then consider trying the SHARE cloudLibrary collection! With over 54,000 owned items plus an additional 90,000 audiobook titles from the audiobook pay-per-use feature, there's sure to be a little of everything guaranteed to pique the interests of your unique patrons. For schools, we also offer a scoping feature to help restrict student access to more adult content. The more library participation, the more content SHARE can add to this shared collection! If you're interested in learning more, want a demo, quote, or trial, please contact Danielle Beasley.

The Polaris 7.3 upgrade added several new features for libraries. Here is a video discussing all the new enhancements.

SHARE would like to welcome the inaugural members to the Common Loan Period Group:

Central Citizens’ Library District, Marrowbone Public Library District, Mississippi Valley Library District, O’Fallon Public Library, Paris Carnegie Library, Rend Lake College, Smithton Public Library, Tolono Public Library, Wayne City Kissner Public Library, and Williamsville Public Library.

Many times, library patrons borrow items from multiple libraries, and this can result in many different loan periods. With shared loan and renewal periods we hope to simplify things for the patrons and for the frontline staff as well. After much discussion the Group suggested the following:

• Books, Kits, Periodicals, and Audiobooks—3-week loan period, with 2 renewals
• DVDs, Music CDs, and Video Games—2-week loan period, with 2 renewals

Libraries have the option to participate fully, or a la carte. If your library would just like to have your books and audiobooks with the common loans, that is fine. You can find all the details at Common Loan Periods under the Circulation tab on the SHARE website.

If your library is interested in joining the Common Loan Period Group, please contact Dena Porter.

SHARE has a new text alert service in the event of a Polaris outage. Text POLARIS to 84483 to receive alerts from SHARE. You will only receive an alert in the event of a system outage.

You will also receive email from SHARE's Official Business mailing list. You can sign up for all emails and newsletters from IHLS and SHARE here.

The SHARE Mobile Library app is here!

Our automated library consortium now has a mobile app! The SHARE Mobile Library, created with the Solus library app platform, allows your patrons to browse new books, renew your items, search digital content, add and manage multiple accounts, and find your nearest public library, all in the app. Keep an eye on this page for all of the latest SHARE Mobile Library news and resources! LEARN MORE

For anyone who has not yet tried Leap, or needs a refresher, here's a training session!