Ride the Storm: Navigating Through Unstable Periods / Katerina Rudko (Belka G...
The Odyssey: Going Paper-less in Interlibrary Loan
1. The Odyssey: Going Paper-less
in Interlibrary Loan
Kimberly A. Farrington
Head of Access Services
Central Connecticut State University
October 26, 2012
Connecticut Library Association
CLASS Conference
3. The Ubiquitous Boxes
Lending: Returnables out on loan
Lending: Completes
Borrowing: Items ordered
Borrowing: Returnables Returned
Article slips saved for copyright for five years.
15. Lending Web Page for Libraries
https://ccsu.illiad.oclc.org/illiad/lending/lendinglogon.html
16.
17. Kimberly A. Farrington
farringtonk@ccsu.edu
(860) 832-3403
Head of Access Services
Central Connecticut State University
Editor's Notes
As we all know, ILL is a paper generator. And, as of 2012, we are not completely paperless. We do generate paper, but they are forms that we use and destroy after the life of the request and there are a few items that we do continue to keep in paper form.There is just no way around it.In Oct 1991 I started my ILL odyssey for less paper while working here at University of Hartford, when on day ONE of my new job as ILL Librarian I was confronted with much, too much paper.
October 7, 1991, my first day of the new ILL job, I was confronted with a box similar to this one. My new supervisor, Anne told me that she had spent days attempting to clean out the ILL desk.My predecessor liked to hoard the slip in drawers. And the there was no order to it. She finally gave up and put all the slips into cartons to be sorted later after I had started. Basically the slips were only sorted by year. Borrowing and lending were all mixed in together. We finally got the borrowing separated from the lending. And then I concentrated on the borrowing materials since they were someone elses. In December of 1997, we destroyed this box of slips.
To keep track of the current requests, we had four green boxes
These boxes were of OCLC requests sorted by lending and borrowing. As a request moved through the system, a slip would be moved from box to box and re-filed. And SAVED. This went on for at least five years. Due to copyright, we have to keep records for five years, but basically that is for matreial that we borrow.The day that I tossed out all of the lending boxes was a party day in our office, but it took me time to get there.
University of Hartfordpurchased the first generation ILL Mngtsoftware called “SaveIT”. My supervisor, Anne actually played with it, but could not get my predecessor interested in using it. I on the other hand jumped at it. SAVE It was based on dbase and in its day was pretty good. As time went on I tended to have my doubts about it and gave it the nickname “LoseIT. But it communicated with OCLC, it printed pick slips, invoices, overdues, tracked copyright. Most of the time it worked well.
In late 1996, Saveit became obsolete when OCLC upgraded from their PRISM to PASSPORT system. UH dove in and purchased CLIO. ILLiad was available at that time. Our systems staff and I had looked at it, but at the time, it was very expensive, in the ballpark of $20,000. And Clio worked. UH was still using CLIO up until this past summer when they finally moved to ILLiad.
In 2001 I left UH and moved to CCSU. They had Clio installed but had been without a librarian for almost a year, so the staff was not utilizing it. 1st thing I changed was to ...they needed to USE IT. And for more than what they had been using it for. I immediately started finding out how they were using it and making changesClio was great to a point. But I really wanted to give our patrons a clean accessible way to order their materials.Clio could have done it, but due to several issues, in 2008 we decided to leave them and start with ILLiad.
Here is the primary reason why we switched: The Patron interface
Patron Main Menu
Whereas we are lucky to have ILLiad, Those who use reQuest will find that there are many features of the reQuest ILL system that mimic management software. It' prints book bands, CCAR slips, sends emails, and basically tracks requests in a similar way like CLIO and ILLiad in their basic forms. With reQuest, a very creative and techie person could create an paperless ILL office
Both Clio and ILLiad allowed us to print pick slips and forms, but ILLiad allows us to customize them. It uses Microsoft Word templates that can be used to merge with individual request information to create book bands or pick slips.Out of the box ILLiad, has two request forms per 8 ½” x 11” piece of paper for both books, and article requests. I modified both so that the book slip would print with a band, and all the address labels that would be needed to send and return the item. These book bands are shredded when the request is returned to our library.Article request slips are shredded after a week or two. These days, things have changed so much with article processing for lending that we only print about 40% to 50% of article slips. So, since June we have stopped printing 50% of our article slips. As I was working on this presentation, Sarah and I decided to get really radical and so I am working to change the process again so that only 10% of the article slips will be printed, the ones for materials that are out in the stacks.
This also applies to our borrowing book bands. The band and the check out slip are printed one per page. We print them in wild colors so that they are easier for our patrons to locate. The check out slip is shredded once we check the material out in ILLiad, when the material is picked up. When the materials are processed for return, all of our paperwork is shredded.
This is an example of our first print overdue notice template. Overdue notices go either by email or mail. This shows the actual merge fields that Word uses from the ILLiad database. We do not keep copies of these. CCSU used to have an overdue file, but we tossed it somewhere around 2005.
We are required to keep paper copies of the bills, either for request fulfillment or for replacements. We keep these in compliance with the State of CT’s retention policy and have to ask permission to shred.
LENDING FAXES, etc. Another way we have gone paperless: When libraries either email, fax or mail an ALA form to CCSU, we create an account for them in ILLiad. We then contact the institution and tell them to use this website for any materials that they need from us. We get faxes so rarely now that 14 months ago when our fax machine died, we did not replace it. If we are lucky we only get maybe two of these a month.
So, where as we are not paperless, we have cut down on the paper used and kept through the years. Any questions?
