WiLS was born to the University of Wisconsin System in 1972 as Wisconsin Interlibrary Loan Services to “provide access to the extensive resources available in the UW Madison campus library collections.” This year, we celebrated our 50th birthday as WiLS, formally known as Wisconsin Library Services, with 667 member organizations: libraries of every type – K12, public, academic, and special – as well as cultural organizations like museums and historical societies. While we are no longer in the interlibrary loan business, we are in the business of helping our members do more with their resources through custom, affordable services and through facilitating collaborations at national, regional, and statewide levels. And we love our work.
In honor of this milestone, we have created this video with the help of some very special current and former staffers, members, and partners. We’ve also expanded our organizational history. We combined a pre-2009 history that former director Kathy Schneider had graciously provided with a thoughtful reflection from former director Stef Morrill on the 2013 organizational transition. We also added more details about what we’ve been up to since 2009, highlighting just some of the significant projects that we’ve had the honor to work on with our members and partners.
We are deeply grateful to you, our community of libraries and cultural organizations, for all the times you called us up to tell us what you need, helped us develop or improve a service through experimentation and input, recommended our work to others, came to or presented at our events, provided your expert advice to other WiLS members, and generally linked arms with us to improve service to our shared ecosystem.
Here’s to the last 50 years and many more to come. Thank you.