From Statewide Resource Sharing to a Statewide Digital Library: Pennsylvania's POWER Library Partnership Story

Executive Summary

More than a decade ago, Pennsylvania set out to modernize one of North America's oldest and largest statewide union catalogs. Today, POWER Library's SHAREit-powered Statewide Catalog delivers a nearly 90% interlibrary loan fulfillment rate, connecting millions of residents to physical collections, licensed databases, and digital library services from a single platform. A resident can find a book on a shelf anywhere in the Commonwealth, request it in seconds, and have it delivered free to their local library.

What Pennsylvania Set Out to Achieve

When HSLC selected SHAREit in 2015 to provide POWER Library ILL services, the objectives have been clear:

• Sustain and strengthen a 40-year-old statewide union catalog, preserving access to public, academic, school, and special collections that single-type public consortia cannot offer
• Give participating libraries, from academic institutions with full-time catalogers to small school libraries, self-service control over their accounts, holdings, and availability
• Extend equitable statewide access to licensed digital resources, regardless of a resident's local library affiliation
• Raise interlibrary loan fulfillment rates while making borrowing faster and simpler for patrons accustomed to two-day, Amazon-era delivery expectations
• Replace the once-a-year batch upload model with current, accurate holdings data to drive operational efficiencies
• Maintain staff training environments in SHAREit while extending usage reporting and analytics
• Extend beyond resource sharing: e-card authentication for EBSCO, Gale, and other statewide databases, on-demand usage reporting, and digital library card provisioning for residents without a local library
• Unify Pennsylvania's vendor-agnostic e-book collections into a single, MARC-based searchable catalog, rather than accessing them separately

The Challenges

Building a statewide digital library requires Pennsylvania to address operational, technical, and service delivery challenges across hundreds of participating libraries.

Challenges that needed to be addressed with their new solution:

• Multiple library types with different workflows and staffing
• Disparate ILS platforms that needed to connect
• Cross-library holdings updates
• Rising patron expectations regarding access and delivery
• Growing digital collection silos

Rather than relying on off-the-shelf functionality alone, HSLC and Soutron Global have continued working together to develop solutions that address the evolving needs of Pennsylvania's library community.

The same trusted solution provider behind SHAREit has evolved from e-card management to include custom development work for Pennsylvania's POWER Library, including authentication to databases such as EBSCO and Gale, usage reporting, and statewide e-book discovery.

Through POWER Library's SHAREit-powered Statewide Catalog, a Pennsylvania resident can request a book on the shelf of a library across the state, request the item through SHAREit, and have the book delivered right to their local library.

The Solution

Beyond Turnkey Software: Partnering to Build a Statewide Digital Library

Created in 1985, Access Pennsylvania was the first, and remains one of the largest, statewide union catalogs in North America, and one of the few true multi-type consortium catalogs anywhere: a single search provides access to materials held by public, school, academic, and special collection libraries across the Commonwealth.

In 2015, following a competitive RFP process, Hosting Solutions and Library Consulting (HSLC), the state's nonprofit library technology partner, selected SHAREit to manage its statewide interlibrary loan (ILL) service, adding in database authentication services and e-card management.

SHAREit anchors resource sharing as the engine behind the Statewide Catalog in POWER Library (Pennsylvania's Electronic Library) where any resident can search the collections of roughly 800 libraries, request a loan from any participating library branch in the state, and have that loan delivered to their local library.

A decade later, the relationship has expanded to support digital access, authentication, analytics, and custom statewide services.

"What makes POWER Library successful is that we're not solving a single problem. We are creating a statewide ecosystem that gives Pennsylvanians access to collections, research, and digital resources regardless of where they live or which library they use. That has required partners who we trust to help as we extend library services from resource sharing into authentication, deeper analytics, e-cards, and new digital services as our needs evolve."

Services Available to Pennsylvania Residents

Today, these efforts help connect hundreds of libraries and millions of Pennsylvania residents to library resources, whether that resource resides on a library shelf or in a licensed digital collection.

Through POWER Library, Pennsylvania residents gain access to authoritative content that is not freely available on the public web, helping students, researchers, entrepreneurs, and lifelong learners make informed decisions with confidence, accessing and exploring library resources such as:

• State licensed newspapers, journals, and reference resources
• Books and eBooks
• Family genealogy database records
• Historical photographs and documents
• DIY resources such as auto and small engine repair
• Curated educational kids and teens experiences at kids.powerlibrary.org and teens.powerlibrary.org bring age-appropriate discovery to Pennsylvania's youngest library users
• Resources to learn a new language

For residents, the experience is intentionally simple.

Behind the scenes, however, it represents years of collaboration between HSLC, technology partners, participating libraries, and content providers. Together, they have created a unified discovery experience spanning physical library collections and digital resources from providers including OverDrive, Gale, EBSCO, and ProQuest.

What began as statewide interlibrary loan evolved into a comprehensive digital library shared development roadmap supporting not only interlibrary loans, but also digital access, discovery, authentication, analytics, and custom development.

"With the Access Pennsylvania catalog, we can draw on special collections or academic library collections. That's something that sets us apart from a system that just shares an ILS and does resource sharing between public libraries only. It is one-stop shopping."

Measurable Resource Sharing Outcome Highlights for the State and HSLC

A decade after implementing SHAREit, following years of continued collaboration improving digital services, HSLC and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania have realized significant benefits:

• After implementation in 2016, initial results included: more than 100,000 titles loaned in a single fiscal year, providing an estimated $1.8 million in avoided purchase costs for Pennsylvania. Today, with a 2026 average hardcover cost of $30.00, a savings of over $2.46 million in requests to borrow versus purchasing the same material has been seen.
• Nearly 90% interlibrary loan fulfillment rate: in fiscal year 2024-25, up from 81-83% in 2016 and 67% before SHAREit
• Efficiently manages the needs of around 800 participating libraries across public, school, academic, and special collections, with patron records for the over 100,000 e-card holders housed in a VERSO library management database. "Our VERSO ILS instance that houses e-card patron data acts as a 'sidecar' to SHAREit," states Maryam.
• Smarter, faster lending: Request Manager automatically builds a list of the most likely responders for each request, and libraries can prioritize nearby lenders, even across county and system lines, for faster turnaround
• Real-time virtual connections are offered, to replace annual file uploads for a growing number of libraries, keeping holdings continuously current
• Quality copy cataloging from full-time cataloging institutions remains a lifeline for smaller libraries without catalogers, helping to reduce workflows
• Holiday scheduler (suspending hundreds of K12 school libraries each summer) remains a core part of library ILL availability scheduling, helping to increase resource sharing efficiencies statewide

POWER Library Outcome Highlights

• E-card generation and authentication have extended POWER Library access to the estimated 250,000-300,000 Pennsylvanians without a local library, with instant address verification and patron records housed in VERSO
• Statewide authentication connects residents to EBSCO, Gale, and other licensed databases with just a library card number
• On-demand usage statistics: vendor data aggregated monthly into a self-service reporting interface lets every library demonstrate its digital impact
• Consolidated e-book catalog that unifies perpetual-license collections and subscriptions from EBSCO, Gale, ProQuest, OverDrive, and more; e-books are now the second most-used format in POWER Library, behind only Scholastic's BookFlix
• Access to the SHAREit user community that contributes ideas, shares best practices, and helps guide ongoing enhancements

Strategic Impact

Maryam draws the comparison residents understand best: "Amazon might provide an e-book immediately or rush a hardback or paperback book delivery, but the Amazon customer pays for it every time, through subscriptions or expedited shipping costs. POWER Library provides free access and delivery to library collections to all state residents. By connecting libraries across Pennsylvania, we can give residents access to a much broader universe of information and services than any one institution could deliver independently."

The environment around statewide resource sharing has changed dramatically since 2016. Libraries have consolidated into regional systems that fulfill much of their borrowing internally, and patrons expect the speed and self-service of modern e-commerce. Today's statewide digital libraries require interoperable technology, authentication, unified discovery, actionable analytics, and long-term technology partnerships that continue evolving as community needs change. In that landscape, Pennsylvania's POWER Library's simplified access to its collection 'superstore' has become its greatest asset.

When HSLC decided to unify its vendor-agnostic e-book collections, it turned to their SHAREit technology provider again. The next chapter is already underway. NCIP expansion will let SHAREit talk directly to local ILS systems, so patrons can discover statewide holdings from their own library's OPAC and place mediated holds themselves, soon to be backed by Pennsylvania's statewide door-to-door delivery service.

Forty years after its creation, Access Pennsylvania is not just enduring; it is growing in ambition, with the HSLC vision and vendor partnerships built to grow with it.

A Partnership Built on Continuous Innovation

Many software implementations conclude when the project goes live.

The relationship between the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, HSLC, and Soutron Global has continued to grow, demonstrating that statewide digital library services are not built through a single software product. They are built through sustained collaboration among libraries, technology partners, and organizations committed to improving library services.

HSLC has found the SHAREit user community to be of value

"The SHAREit user group is very strong and important to the SHAREit Community. Not only does the user group offer ongoing communication between Soutron Global and its customers, but the user group also allows customers to share information and expertise by building relationships that extend beyond interlibrary loan services."

As Pennsylvania's vision for POWER Library expanded beyond traditional interlibrary loan, HSLC pursued new ideas with confidence, knowing its technology partner understood the operational realities of statewide library services and was committed to long-term innovation. Over two decades, that collaboration has turned an initial software implementation into a technology relationship spanning statewide resource sharing, authenticated access to digital resources, custom development, analytics, and operational services that continue to evolve alongside Pennsylvania's libraries.

For other statewide library organizations, Pennsylvania's experience offers an important lesson: the most successful technology investments are not defined by the software alone, but by software providers that continue delivering innovation long after implementation.

The partnership now reaches far beyond interlibrary loan. Soutron Global manages the authentication layer for POWER Library's state- and federally funded databases, aggregates vendor usage data into an on-demand reporting interface and operates the e-card system that has issued digital library cards, many to residents with no local library at all.