Gates Foundation Gives WebJunction $12.6 Million.

This post comes from the American Libriaries Association. On June 21 as the American Library Association Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., was opening, Ohio-based library cooperative group OCLC announced that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s U.S. Library Initiative would give $12.6 million to its online community portal WebJunction. The five-year grant “will help us to sustain the programs that many library professionals are really beginning to depend on,” Bob Murphy of OCLC told American Libraries.

One of the grant’s goals is to ensure WebJunction’s self-sustainability within OCLC by strengthening its revenue-generating activities and creating additional services to assist all types of libraries. “The self-sustaining aspect is important,” Murphy emphasized, “because we want WebJunction to continue on and on, and to be a place that library professionals can count on for their continuing education needs.”

The Gates Foundation will also fund software upgrades that will include new content- and learning-management systems—improvements that WebJunction Executive Director Marilyn Gell Mason said in a prepared statement are part of “the functionality and flexibility that partners and users tell us they need.” Click here to read the rest of this article.