I am writing
this as a former Interlending and Document Delivery Officer at King's College London and soon to be
former member of the Forum for Interlending Committee. I will
genuinely miss being involved in sharing resources (and ideas) as well
as supporting the excellent work of FIL.
I thought I might write my last blog post with an anecdote that will possibly segue into a ramble.
A
few years ago now whilst working at King's College London my department
received a visit from a librarian who had visited King's under the
Erasmus scheme. I think he might have been from Estonia. Anyway, he
had a chat with all the different teams in the Information Resources
department. When he got to the Interlending and Document Delivery team we ended up having a talk
about his interest in photography. He'd travelled a lot around Eastern
Europe taking photos of trains and railway stations if I can recall rightly. It was
very interesting so we ended up going off topic for the most of our
discussion. Towards the end though I think I expressed my frustration
about trying to find decent union catalogues. It was at this time that
he showed me something that really impressed me. It was the KVK or the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog.
Now
I have no idea who created it, I have no idea what the motivation was.
I have to say however that it really helped me locate resources
internationally. It's hosted by Karlsruher Institut für Technologie and
is a "meta search interface" that includes union catalogues from all
over the world. It behaves in a similar way to Search25 in that it
searches other catalogues simultaneously but instead of searching
through higher education libraries within Greater London (or
thereabouts) it searches through a range of union
catalogues worldwide (as well as some book vendors and repositories).
It's
very helpful when you've gone through all the typical avenues you might
use. For example I would typically search through Copac, Search25,
Suncat, Pubmed, Worldcat and so forth. But the KVK is a portal with a much
broader range of locations. And wielding IFLA vouchers I would
tactfully approach (often with the aid of Google Translate) a
prospective library. When such an exchange was successful and I was
able to get a library user the resource they wanted it was a good
feeling.
In
fact it was one of the great aspects of being involved in this sort of
work. What people sometimes forget is that libraries are generally not
obligated to share their resources with other libraries. There is a
sense to me that librarians share their resources because in some way it
contributes positively to research and learning. It will in the very least help the library user achieve their current goal - whatever that is. Most really appreciated what we do. OK, it's also true that Interlending staff
have to justify their roles by generating revenue. Sharing resources is just
what you do when you do this type of job. But you could, if you wanted
to, avoid doing something you felt involved too much time/effort. Not
everyone responds cordially to a request for something where they feel it's not convenient to fulfil. But in my opinion most do. Having
the opportunity to collaborate with people the world over actively
involved in resource sharing was genuinely rewarding.
Attending
the last IFLA ILDS Conference made me realise how people share
resources worldwide and that there's so much more we can learn from each other in
terms of good practice and service development. Libraries in
the UK all do things differently also. But there's a real sense of good
will among Interlending practitioners here and a desire to get the job
of resource sharing done together. Where there are different
approaches encountered there are potential innovations to be considered
and perhaps implemented. Attending FIL Conferences was always such a
great way to assess how you could improve your service.
I hope those that attend this year's conference all come away with ideas to further push their service forward. It's a great job to be doing.
Mark Kluzek
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