SUNLINK

Funded by the Florida Department of Education, SUNLINK is Florida's K-12 public school union catalog, a shared database of materials in Florida K-12 library media centers. Imagine a giant card catalog or electronic catalog containing the records of all school library media centers in Florida! And students and teachers can ask to borrow any of them! That's SUNLINK.

The primary purpose of SUNLINK is to promote resource sharing among Florida public schools. Teachers and students are able to locate needed resources and borrow them through interlibrary loan. Full MARC records also provide increased access to information in individual schools. SUNLINK is also widely used by media specialist for weeding, collection development, and cataloging. It can be used to enhance instruction in information skills, database searching, and critical thinking. Keyword, Boolean logic, specific phrase, wild card, and word truncation are all supported by SUNLINK. SUNLINK provides access to books, audiovisual materials, and educational websites to meet the information needs of Florida students.

SUNLINK can be used to support the curriculum through keyword searching and reading level indexing. Teachers can use any keyword from the curriculum or Sunshine State Standards to identify potential teaching resources within the school, district, region or state. Users can search by title, author, subject, format, location, language, date or any combination of these. In addition, SUNLINK can be used to search for books by reading level, interest level, Lexile or by features of several popular reading programs (currently Accelerated Reader and Reading Counts.) Full color book cover images in two sizes are provided for many titles and a bibliography feature is available for users. SUNLINK schools have access to downloadable MARC records, saving media specialists time and money.

In addition to building and maintaining the database, SUNLINK provides training, technical support, information, and promotional materials to Florida's school library media specialists. SUNLINK's "Weed-of-the-month-Club" is used by thousands of media specialists worldwide to help weed collections a little at a time. The "SUNLINK Link of the Week" highlights websites useful to library media specialists. SUNLINK also provides Free Training to all Florida school library media specialists, free monthly newsletter, @SUNLINK, and toll-free telephone support.

SUNLINK assists in local school library media center automation efforts, helps Florida's public school library media centers meet the national guidelines outlined in Information Power, and extends the collection in any SUNLINK school media center to over 17 million items in over 2100 schools.

Please contact:
Tom Owens, Ph.D.

For additional information please visit http://www.sunlink.ucf.edu