Kentucky Virtual Library

From 1999 to 2009, KYVL has served the Commonwealth through the public universities, community & technical college system, public libraries, public schools, state agencies like Ky Dept for Libraries and Archives, hospitals and other special libraries and many independent and private schools and colleges.

In honor of those 10 years, we are nearly complete with our reVisioning@10 Years Strategic Planning initiative.  We have new goals & objectives as well as a new vision, mission and core values.  The new plan will cover our operational and strategic agenda for the next three years, 2010-2013.

Take a look at KYVL successes these last 10 years!

10 Years of Service:

• Since its inception in November 1999, KYVL’s database collection has supported over 125 million searches.
• Our ground courier service has delivered a total of 741,970 containers and 1,153,056 items.
• KYVL’s Voyager Consortium (integrated library system) serves 19 institutions that collectively house over 7 million individual items.
• The Kentuckiana Digital Library has digitized historic material representing 18 Kentucky archives, including 1,000 books, over 80,000 digital photographs, 200,000 pages from Kentucky Newspapers, and 100,000 pages from the historic Daily Racing Form.

10 Years of Support:

• KYVL has provided countless training and continuing education opportunities for P-20 educators and librarians throughout the state.
• KYVL coordinates courier service for 445 “stops” at 183 libraries. KYVL provides this service at no cost for 171 libraries, thus allowing lab kits, books, videos, and more to be moved between libraries.
• Over ten years, KYVL has supported the Voyager Consortium with over $4.5 million in software, hardware, data migration, training and hosting costs.

10 Years of Savings:

• If KYVL members individually purchased the same databases offered by KYVL, they would have paid an additional $150 million in retail costs over the last 10 years.
• Over the last decade, the KYVL Courier service has saved Kentucky libraries a minimum of $6 million dollars – the combined cost of shipping all those items at normal rates.
• The Kentuckiana Digital Library has cultivated over 1.5 million dollars in national grant funding.
• Members of KYVL Voyager Consortium have enjoyed a 75% discount off the retail costs of software implementation, compared to costs associated with individual purchasing.

KYVL & Public Postsecondary

• For every dollar the public KY university libraries contribute to KYVL, they get back about $10 in resources.
• Our 8 public KY universities would pay $1.9 million to independently acquire the same 25 licensed databases provided via Kentucky Virtual Library.
• In FY08-09, public KY universities logged 8.9 million searches—that is less than 2 cents per search.
• KCTCS would pay $1.6 million retail if each college library independently purchased the research databases.
• In FY08-09, KCTCS users logged 2 million searches.
• KCTCS is paying less than 2 cents for each search made in the KYVL resources.

Kentucky Virtual Library is a success through the support of all our partner members, planning and working together, purchasing collaboratively and applying for funding collectively.   Thank you to all the KYVL members!