About SHARE Consortium

The SHARE Consortium (or, simply, “SHARE”) is an automation and resource-sharing partnership. Membership may include public libraries, individual K-12 schools, school districts, and other types of agencies. There are a number of benefits of participating in such a partnership:

1. Cost Reduction: By pooling resources, everybody wins. Libraries are able to provide more/better services for less, county and municipal governments receive a strong return on investment (ROI), and citizen taxpayers receive world-class library service for pennies on the dollar.
2. Resource Sharing: By participating in an automation consortium, individual library collections are linked together into one massive, comprehensive collection. This means that citizens can use any library they choose and have access to (literally) millions of items beyond what the local library purchases.

Prairie Lakes Library System provides behind-the-scenes technical and administrative support for SHARE. Examples of the types of support we provide to the SHARE membership include:

• Making sure the servers and software which support SHARE are planned, deployed, and maintained appropriately;
• Serving as a fiscal and budgetary agent for SHARE;
• Preparing for, hosting, and following-up on meetings of the SHARE Director’s Council and Task Forces;
• Fostering a collaborative approach to policy development and the patron experience;
• Researching & recommending courses of action to the SHARE governing bodies;

PLLS provides support for SHARE to its member libraries as a free service. Libraries (or other institutions) which participate in SHARE, but are not members of Prairie Lakes Library System may receive technical and administrative support on a fee-based model.