On June 21 as the American Library Association Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., was opening, Ohio-based library cooperative group OCLC announced that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s U.S. Library Initiative would give $12.6 million to its online community portal WebJunction. The five-year grant “will help us to sustain the programs that many library professionals are really beginning to depend on,” Bob Murphy of OCLC told American Libraries.
One of the grant’s goals is to ensure WebJunction’s self-sustainability within OCLC by strengthening its revenue-generating activities and creating additional services to assist all types of libraries. “The self-sustaining aspect is important,” Murphy emphasized, “because we want WebJunction to continue on and on, and to be a place that library professionals can count on for their continuing education needs.”
The Gates Foundation will also fund software upgrades that will include new content- and learning-management systems—improvements that WebJunction Executive Director Marilyn Gell Mason said in a prepared statement are part of “the functionality and flexibility that partners and users tell us they need.”
The goals are in keeping with the vision Jill Nishi, manager of the Gates Foundation’s U.S. Libraries Initiative, shared with AL in a January interview, in which she said that USLI would focus over the next several years on “ways in which we can support better connectivity” and help libraries “position themselves as important community institutions and as the solution to other kinds of pressing public-policy problems.”
The $12.6-million commitment comes six months after Nishi announced a $3.9-million grant to WebJunction so the portal could help public libraries plan for and manage technology, train staff and patrons, and share best practices. Since its 2003 launch, WebJunction has more than 29,000 registered members, and more than 300,000 unique users have visited the site.
Posted June 21, 2007.