MCLS State Library Delivery Service Temporarily Paused

MUSKINGUM COUNTY, Ohio- The Muskingum County Library System has announced a temporary interruption for their consortium service, SearchOhio and OhioLINK.

SearchOhio and OhioLINK expands patrons access to about 10 million additional public and academic items from different libraries across the state of Ohio. 

About a year ago, the State Library started using a new delivery provider, but Sean Fennell, Marketing and Community Relations Director at MCLS, said there’s been some issues and explained why there will be an interruption. 

“Unfortunately, there’s been some issues with deliveries ever since they switched their delivery service, so they’re switching to a different delivery service,” Fennell stated. “They are switching back actually to the one they had before and so with the switch in delivery systems, there’s going to be a little bit of time that they would need to kind of let that transition happen and that’s going to delay a lot of the deliveries for quite some time, and also pause the service.”

This is a statewide switch and will affect all libraries a part of this consortium.  

Fennell said this switch is important because it’s essential for residents to have access to these items and get them on time.

“Really the entire reason for this switch back is to make sure that people are getting their materials quickly and in a way that we were guaranteed when we joined the consortium as well. So, the deliveries have just been too slow and the state library of Ohio recognizes that and they are working to correct the issue by switching to a different delivery service,” Fennell said.

Starting Friday on March 11th the catalog ‘request’ button will disappear and all requests from SearchOhio and OhioLINK will be temporarily paused. This will only affect consortium items and not the MCLS collection and catalog of items.

The consortium service is estimated to be back up by the end of April, providing resources and faster deliveries.