A year in review...

Well, I’ve just had my annual Personal & Development Review meeting with my Line Manager. It’s that time of year when you have to write a self-assessment and review all of the objectives you set for yourself 12 months ago. Thankfully I have achieved most of mine and have been able to set a few new ones for the coming session. The changing world of ILL can make it easy to set goals as there’s always something new coming that you can investigate and possibly implement into your daily routine. Last year, my main objective was to start charging for uncollected ILLs. We’ve been doing this for a full year now and it seems to be going well with 702 reminder notices being sent and only 57 charges added to patron accounts.

This year, one of my objectives is to work with my Line Manager to implement a full ILL review as there have been many changes with regard to budgets, our system, staffing etc but not many changes to the general ILL policies. Taking some pointers from the presentations at the last FIL conference I’m interested to see where we can cut down on unnecessary procedures but mainly to see where we can go with borrowing e-books. We seem to spend a lot of our budget on borrowing material from libraries abroad and the cost of posting these items is often more than the cost of the loan itself. Listening to Annette Moore from University of Sussex regarding effectively ‘renting’ books via EBL sounds like the ideal solution. It will be interesting to see how feasible this is for us as we often find that one dept/system does not work well with another….

It’s also almost time for our first Committee meeting of the new session and I’m looking forward to meeting the new recruits!  See you all soon!

Joanne