ILL, Going back to basics,or how to manage ILL requests with no ILL management system

 

I have put in the picture to remind everyone that it is summer.  I hope if you have had your summer break you enjoyed it, and if you are yet to go that you have a good time! Fingers crossed you have caught some of the sunshine in the last two weeks. I am just back from holiday so just getting back into work. 

At the moment my major task is making sure that our brand new library discovery service is all working in terms of accepting ILL requests.  It is too early to make any judgments on how this is working.  Sterling work from my colleagues while I was on holiday certainly helped get things off to a good start.  Thank you guys!

I thought it would be useful for fellow ILLers to highlight some key lessons I learned keeping the ILL service running during the period that the new library discovery and management service was being implemented.   My remit had been to work out with colleagues from IT and senior managers how to manage ILL requests without using our old ILL management software as it was integrated with our old library discovery and management service. 

•        Plan early - by moving away from using our old ILL management software two months before the new service went live there were very few requests that had to be transferred over.
•         Use BLDSS - by ordering as much as possible on BLDSS we were able to let the BL do our request management for us.  It proved invaluable in tracing requests that were delayed.
•         Create Request references – this is something we did not do and I know some of you had to contact us to get request references.  Sorry!
•         Keep an online request form – we were able to get our regular online request form directed to the generic ILL email.  Personally if you are not able to do this then I would advise anyone to create an online request form if possible as it means you get requests through in a usable form
•         Keep the public service side of ILL as close to the old procedure as possible - counter staff saw little change in what they had to do to give out and return ILLs making their life easier at a time that they had to learn a lot of new things for the system.  It cut down on training that had to be done.
•         Buy some coloured paper!  - we used different coloured paper for requests that we had not processed using our old ILL management software and this got positive feedback from colleagues on the counter.  They liked the fact they could clearly differentiate between the requests ‘on the system’ and those that were not

Enjoy the rest of the summer and happy ILLing

Karen Paine

FIL Committee
Inter-Library Loans Senior Library Assistant