SHARE-ing is caring, feline edition

It’s me again. Chobe.

I’ve already told you about my furry co-workers here at OCLC. Now let me tell you all about the purr-fect pets of the SHARES resource sharing community.

SHARES is the resource sharing arm of the OCLC Research Library Partnership, and it consists of a trusted, generous, and pet-loving network of partners that provide access to libraries’ collections. Led by RLP Senior Program Officer Dennis Massie, SHARES community members meet regularly to share knowledge and provide support. In fact, my human told me that since the beginning of the pandemic, the SHARES folks have met for over 100 virtual town halls, to discuss how to manage interlibrary loan stuff during this crazy pandemic.

I guess if you’re spending that much time together talking about how to do hard things, you get pretty close. It’s a pretty remarkable, trusting group that does new and nifty things together, like the International ILL Toolkit, which these energetic humans of SHARES created to make global resource sharing easier for libraries worldwide. They even made it free.

Nice.

But of course, the really important thing is the pets. I got to meet a lot of these pets and their humans recently when I joined the short weekly “SHARES social.” It was a BLAST!

I met Dorian and Ray, who are the furry co-workers of Lars Leon at the University of Kansas. Dorian spent most of the call on Lars’s lap while Ray slept through the call. I like to do both of those things during video calls, too!

They were super chill unlike Sarah Jane–a DOG! duh!–who is the furry co-worker of Kerry Kristine McElrone at Swarthmore College. Of course, Sarah Jane had just received a new chew toy–a stuffed, furry pink champagne flute–and she was starting happy hour early.

Sashi and Shimi, the furry friends of former RLP program officer Karen Smith-Yoshimura also made an appearance. They are apparently retired now, like their human, but I can’t see that their lives are much different than those of us still working.

Margaret Ellingson from Emory University was working from a work work office (not a home office), and we didn’t get to see Tango, who was working from home. But we did get to hear all about Tango’s new wooly cat cave. That sounds comfy! Megan Gaffney from the University of Delaware wasn’t able to attend the social, but she shared a photo of her co-worker, Macintosh. I’m puzzled that Macintosh seems to be keeping a Dell computer warm.

Many of these furry co-workers were featured in a SHARES pets calendar that the team secretly put together for Dennis, for fun and to thank him for leading the group through the pandemic.

Dorian is featured this month, for April! Sarah Jane is also there, along with 10 other furry co-workers, even including a horse named Gigi!

But you can’t go out and buy this calendar (too bad, right?); this close-knit team of humans did this themselves, to celebrate their furry co-workers like me. Wait, my human co-worker says it was really to celebrate Dennis and the SHARES community. She says that SHARES has really been a supportive community for people who found it easier to do hard things together than apart. That people are better together.

Whatever.

I’m going to talk to my human about that cat cave.

Thanks to my human co-worker, Senior Program Officer Rebecca Bryant, as well as Senior Manager Merrilee Proffitt for their assistance with this post.