In the days and weeks following
a FIL conference it is always great to be able to revisit the presentations
through the items uploaded onto the FIL website. This year I was particularly
keen to review the presentation and slides of Lynn Brown & Celia Hudson who
presented on ‘Leaning ILLs at Nottingham’.
I think a lot of what they said resonated with
many of the delegates as we all recognised, to a certain degree, the ways our
own ILL services and operations had become cluttered or cumbersome. I was
certainly inspired to come back to work and ‘lean’ out our ILL procedures. ILL
Essex was going to be put on a diet, a new regime which would hopefully
streamline our job and improve the service for our readers.
We couldn’t start
immediately but we had plans to overhaul the system once our upgraded LMS was
functioning as we wished. The timing also coincided, rather conveniently, with
changes to the staffing in ILL so we would be able to teach new staff the new
methods from the outset.
With the help of a
colleague, who is a wizard with flow charts, we started mapping what we did,
why we did it and whether, in fact, all our procedures were strictly necessary.
We started by looking at what statistics we needed and how we calculated them,
realising that our LMS system and OCLC actually calculate most of them for us,
so there was no need for the level of
manual intervention that we had been using.
Following from this we
looked at every procedure in turn. We seemed to ask the question ‘why’ a lot
and didn’t necessarily get a very good answer, other than, because that’s what
we have always done!
Our first new graduate
trainee has now come into ILL and will our guinea pig and tester for all the
new procedures; He seems to be coping fine so that is a relief. We have also
even managed to cut out keeping lots of unnecessary paperwork which is
definitely an added bonus.
Thank you to Lynn and
Celia for giving me the incentive to make changes for improvements sake. So if you
haven’t already checked out their presentation I would heartily recommend that
you do. It is with all the others from FIL 2015 on the website at:
Now back to work……
Sandra
photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/53326337@N00/2493803790">Folders</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">(license)</a>
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