Organizational Memberships
American Library Association
Kresge Library is a long-standing member of the American Library Association. ALA's governing council voted commitment to five Key Action Areas as guiding principles for directing the Association’s energies and resources: Diversity, Equity of Access, Education and Continuous Learning, Intellectual Freedom, and 21st Century Literacy. With the development of a series of strategic plans, beginning with ALA Goal 2000, ALAction 2005, ALA Ahead to 2010, these principles have expanded to seven Key Action Areas, which are supplemented by ALA Ahead to 2015, the Association’s current strategic plan.
Council of Library Directors/Deans (COLD)
Oakland University’s library dean participates as a member of COLD, a state-wide leadership group comprised of the library deans/directors of all fifteen four-year public universities in Michigan. COLD conducts some of its work through collaborative subgroups it creates, such as the Cooperative Collection Development Discussion Group and the Interlibrary Loan Group. Several OU librarians and library staff contribute valuable work on COLD committees and groups.
ELUNA
The Libraries use an integrated library system called Voyager, from Ex Libris. For this reason, the Kresge Library maintains an active membership and participation in the Ex Libris Users of North America (ELUNA), a not-for-profit educational group of users of library software products licensed by Ex Libris. ELUNA members include academic, public, governmental, and corporate libraries from the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean.
LOEX Clearinghouse
LOEX is a self-supporting, non-profit educational clearinghouse for library instruction and information literacy information. Founded in 1971 after the "First Annual Conference on Library Orientation" at Eastern Michigan University, LOEX (Library Orientation Exchange) has grown from a lending repository of library instruction materials and host of an annual conference on the subject to an internationally known organization that serves as a conduit for those working in the field. LOEX has over 650 member libraries in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.
MeLCat and MichiCard Networks
Oakland University’s libraries belong to two statewide networks in order to share resources among participating academic, public, school, and other libraries: MeLCat is a statewide library catalog and borrowing service, allowing users to access over 7 million books, audiobooks, CDs and DVDs, while MichiCard is a voluntary collaborative program that allows Michigan citizens the opportunity to access the vast resources and information housed in other Michigan libraries with minimum barriers. The Libraries’ participation in these networks provides OU students, faculty, and staff with access to additional resources and information housed in many of Michigan's best libraries.
Michigan Library Association
MLA is Michigan's oldest and largest library association spanning three centuries, Guided by the belief that free access to information is the cornerstone of a free society, the Michigan Library Association has advocated for libraries on behalf of the state's residents for over 100 years. MLA defends the right to read, advocates for adequate library funding, clarifies library governance issues, promotes librarian education, and works for free access of information to all residents.
Midwest Collaborative for Library Services
MCLS is a non-profit membership organization comprised of all types of libraries in Indiana and Michigan. MCLS provides libraries a convenient, single point of contact for training, discounted group purchasing, and technical support for electronic resources. MCLS saves member libraries time and money.
OCLC
OCLC's public purpose is to establish, maintain and operate a computerized library network and to promote the evolution of library use, of libraries themselves and of librarianship, and to provide processes and products for the benefit of library users and libraries, including such objectives as increasing availability of library resources to individual library patrons and reducing the rate-of-rise of library per-unit costs, all for the fundamental public purpose of furthering ease of access to and use of the ever-expanding body of worldwide scientific, literary and educational knowledge and information.
Portico
In demonstration of its commitment to preservation of the scholarly record, the Library is a member of Portico, a digital preservation and electronic archives service. Portico is among the largest community-supported digital archives in the world. Working with libraries, publishers, and funders, it preserves e-journals, e-books, and other electronic scholarly content to ensure researchers and students will have access to it in the future.
RIDES (of MCLS)
RIDES (formerly known as MeL Delivery) is a statewide library courier service, servicing Michigan libraries, provided by ProMed Delivery, Inc.
Questions? Contact Kath Borg, the Library's Executive Secretary, at borg@oakland.edu or 248.370.2486.