Happy New Year All!

Hope that you all had a lovely Christmas and New Year. It certainly is a shock to the system as today is my first day back in! 

I'm delighted to say that today's blog post is a guest one and there was very little arm twisting done to get it either! I'd like to say a big 'Thank You' to Caroline Rauter at Swansea University for the contribution. If you would like to follow in Caroline's footsteps - please do get in touch!

Marie Lancaster

FIL Chair

I don’t get out much...

Just before Christmas I was pleased to be invited by Marie Lancaster to attend the forward planning meeting for the Document Delivery Working Group at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Marie and I have known each other for several years having met at a FIL conference and as well as becoming friends, have developed a very useful collaborative working relationship.

It was extremely interesting to explore the similarities and the differences between two institutions delivering a traditional inter-library loan service. I was particularly intrigued to find out how Cardiff Met intends to phase out paper request forms for the 2014-15 academic year.  It is not something that I have been brave enough to contemplate, but as Swansea University will be opening a second campus in 2015 it is something that we would like to emulate.  Any opportunity to cut down on the amount of paper that we use as a service instinctively feels like a good idea, even though a paper trail can be really useful when unpicking some of the intricate queries that we sometimes get.

It also seems that we are more cautious with our expenditure and authorisation mechanisms than Cardiff Met. Their patrons do not require authorisation whereas we still require postgraduate and undergraduate requesters to have obtained a payment authorisation before we process the requests.  They have a defined I.L.L. budget and keep a record of departmental spending to ensure that their total expenditure stays within a pre-defined limit. In contrast, we charge a portion of the inter-lending cost back to individual departments with the library general fund subsidising the rest of the charge. Perhaps it is time for us to review all of our procedures?  How do I sell self-authorised I.L.L.s to management as beneficial... plenty to think about in 2014!

Discussions also ranged across their successful in-house undergraduate theses digitisation project for the repository; coping with multi-site relocations; contemplating e-delivery as a default setting; the proposed shared welsh library management system (LMS); archiving declaration forms and marketing the Document Delivery Service. I particularly liked their very professional, branded book-straps and came away with a sample to wave under my manager’s nose.

If you are able to create the opportunity for closer collaboration with another institution or library authority I would encourage you to discover the benefits of sharing good practice and innovation. It works for me.

Caroline Rauter

Document Supply Services Manager, Swansea University