Bank holidays

It's that time of year again so had to add the daffodils.  I love the start of Easter as it means that we have all the bank holidays to look forward to.  Work is so much better when you have the Monday off!
In Public Library Land the last few weeks of March tend to be quite manic. I manage the stock budget for Swansea Libraries so I've been trying to make sure that all my subscriptions are paid, a couple of standing orders are paid whilst I've got a budget.

We've been quite lucky up until now and haven't had to face too many cutbacks but they are now kicking in. My budget is being cut for the next financial year so I'm having to revise how we spend our money. Joining  Books4U , which is an Inter Library Loan scheme between libraries in South East Wales,  has made a huge difference to our ILL budget. We have a man in a van going round all the authorities twice a week picking up and dropping off requests. The cost of running the scheme is split between us based on population and usage.

I'm really looking forward to this years' conference in June. Lots of people have already signed up so don't forget to book before 17th April to take advantage of the early bird price of £245.  It's an absolute bargain as the Midland Hotel has an excellent reputation.

Happy Easter everyone and look forward to seeing you all in Manchester!

Why are we waiting….??

A student complained recently that a book we had ordered for her hadn’t arrived in time for her to use it and she therefore felt it was unfair that we charge her for not collecting it. The book arrived here 10 days after she submitted her request (and 4 of those days were over weekends!) It made me think about when I started in ILL (before the time of email requesting) when we used to put printed requests into envelopes and post them to other libraries. There would often be a rota on the back of the request form so that the first library could pass it along to the next if they were unable to supply. It used to take weeks to get books that BL didn’t have and I don’t remember so many people complaining about the time it took. I think people are now so used to finding things online within a few minutes that they forget that requesting physical copies of books takes a bit longer. They have no idea what processes we have to go through to find a book if BL doesn’t have a copy available straight away. Checking Copac, OCLC Worldcat, Amazon and that’s often just to confirm that the item exists let alone find a location willing to lend it. ‘Oh, I found it on Copac, you can get it from Oxford’ is a common cry. Yes, maybe they do have it at Oxford but as it’s quite a recent publication they will not lend it. ‘I found it on Google’– oh well then, that should be easy enough to conjour up a copy from the vague (and probably imprecise) information you have provided from a random page on the internet. ‘My lecturer said you should have it but I can’t find it’ – did your lecturer think to submit it on a reading list to allow us to try and buy a copy for stock? No? Oh, that’s a shame, it’s the telepathic librarians week off this week otherwise we would have been right on that.  And my all-time favourite ‘I’m not sure why you can’t get a copy straight away, I mean, no-one else will be reading up on this subject’…….so that’s why it’s held in every library’s short loan collection then?

The flip side of this is the number of books we receive within 2 days of submitting the request and the books languish on the holdshelf for weeks. Last year we were returning approx. 30 books per month that people had ordered and not collected. In August 2014 we decided to charge £5 for any non-collected material. This seems to be working as the number of items returned without being used in the past 8 months currently stands at 36!

It will be interesting to see what happens if/when we are able to borrow ebooks…..watch this space!

Joanne 

FIL Conference Booking - Now Open!

Hopefully by now you have seen one of the many emails winging their way round announcing the opening of bookings for the 2015 FIL Conference.

So maybe you are asking 'Why do I need to go to the conference?'

Well, first of all this if the only UK annual conference specifically for and about the world of inter-library loans, a good enough reason right there!  There are so few opportunities for Inter-lenders to get together for training, sharing of ideas, best practice or just networking with other inter-lenders that any opportunity like this we need to grab.

Those of you who have been lucky enough to go to the conference in the past will know the benefits and like me will be looking forward to meeting up with people you have met at past conferences, meeting new people and just chatting about what you do, what they do, how they do it and sometimes even why?  It really is a great place / way to find out so much that's going on in the inter-lending world as a whole, picking up ideas, hearing about new (to you) systems and procedures that you hadn't even thought about.

Personally as a Public Library inter-lender I've learnt a huge amount from our colleagues in HE over the years, especially in the last few years on Open Access sources and how us as a public library service can utilise these for our customers. Of course one of the other bonuses is the network of contacts you make, you get to meet people in other sectors, learn about their collections and know you have a friendly contact that you can turn to when you are looking for that elusive paper, dissertation, book or journal.

Obviously the other attractions of the conference are the speaker sessions and workshops and the sponsors who are advertising their goods - this also often gives you the chance to ask questions on problems you are having or just see the new developments they have to offer.

I can promise you we have a good range of subjects this year and some excellent speakers, so keep you eyes open as the formal programme will be coming out very shortly.

Finally, this year the conference is in Manchester at a very lovely hotel, The Midland, Manchester and as part of the conference we have arranged a guided tour of the beautifully refurbished and reopened Manchester Central Library.

So follow the link below and book your place on the ONLY UK Interlending Conference, see you there!

FIL Interland 2015 Conference - Interlending at the crossroads?

Tracey Jackson
FIL Committee Member

Inter-Library Loans Supervisor
Hertfordshire Libraries

Comings and Goings

Comings and Goings

Here at the Albert Sloman Library we have just said our goodbyes to our Librarian, who has retired after having been at this library for 33 years and seen it through numerous changes, internally and externally. We are currently having a new extension built on to the library which will give us more room for more books, so hopefully more lending on the part of the ILL team. This got me thinking as we all wait with anticipation the announcement of who is to be the successor for the Librarian about how things have changed, even in the 12 years that I have been working in the field of Inter lending.

Whilst it is certainly not the case everywhere, we have noticed a drop in the overall number of items requested by our readers, although we have seen an increase in requests for items which are more unusual and sometimes more difficult to obtain. We have seen the implementation of electronic requesting and electronic delivery, which means that some readers can gain access to documents they need without ever having to leave the comfort of their homes.

Recent, and might I say long overdue, changes to copyright legislation have made our lives easier but busier as we can now fill, and receive more requests than before, which is great for our readers and great for our income, so a win-win situation all round.

I do sometimes think that Inter-lending is seen as a kind of ‘add-on’ service for the main library as a whole. I am hopeful that our merit will be noted by the new Librarian in time. Our users certainly seem to like us and our service, they even sometimes mention us in their list of ‘thank-yous’ which is always gratifying.

It would be great to hear the views of others who work in Inter lending about what things have changed in their workplace or maybe about something strange or unusual that they have been asked for etc. If you would like a guest Blog spot we would really like to hear from you.

For now, let’s see what the next twelve years bring – hopefully a finished extension.