Online all the time from school, home, work, or at your library!

Did you know that any Minnesota resident can get 24/7 online access to thousands of magazines, journals, newspapers, and e-books on a vast array of topics with just their public library card?

The Electronic Library of Minnesota (ELM) is a virtual library administered by Minitex, an information and resource sharing program of the Minnesota Office of Higher Education (OHE) and the University of Minnesota Libraries.

ELM is funded by the state legislature through the OHE and the Minnesota Department of Education. The investment is well worth it: the estimated cost for all Minnesota public, K-12, and higher education libraries to individually subscribe to the resources contained in ELM is over $75 million. The cost for Minitex to license ELM resources for statewide access? Just over $2 million.

This makes ELM heavily relied on by many public and academic librarians across the state, who use ELM to provide their patrons with resources most local libraries and schools cannot afford on their own. And use it they do. The 17.7 million ELM searches in fiscal year 2010 was a 61% increase since fiscal year 2006.

A recent effort to solicit feedback on how ELM was used across the state generated a 60-page collection of over 200 stories, including one from a high school librarian who said ELM "is like an Emergency Room of knowledge. Without ELM resources, we would struggle mightily to provide accurate, timely and reliable resources for our students." One middle school student even reported that ELM "saved my school career and kept me from detention about 9000 times."

Learn more about ELM and read more stories like these at elm4you.org.