Bedding in a new ILL Management System

Bedding in a new ILL Management System

I thought I would start my blog off with a picture of the kind of tidy quiet corner I would like to be in!  Sadly it is not where I am at the moment.

In the summer I blogged about managing without an ILL management system as a new library discovery and management service was being implemented at my library.  This has now happened. The new ILL management system has been in place since August.  My remit now is to get the most efficient workflow in place and make the most of the ILL management system’s functionality.  These are some key lessons that I have learned so far working on this process.

·        Get IT on board – technical support is essential as there will inevitably be some tweaks that IT can do to help you.  I am still asking my IT colleagues (if you are reading this LSE IT thank you for patience with me!) questions.

·        Start slowly – although it can be frustrating for your customers it may be worth considering offering a very basic service for a short time, and then gradually adding in services such as requesting from libraries outside the UK and renewals.  It is better to offer a consistent but basic service at first rather than try to do everything at once and end up struggling under a mountain of problems.  As a naturally quite cautious person I have taken a bit longer than I maybe should to get all services up and running, but I doubt if our service would have been as stable as it has been without a gradual lead in to full service.

·        Keep colleagues informed – This is really obvious but I am sure many will agree is not always the easiest thing to do.  If I could start the process off again I would have spent more time on informing colleagues of what of what is going on.

·        Training – Train staff as quickly as possible.  This is not always easy.  In the modern world of ILL few libraries have the luxury of staff dedicated to ILL only.  Most of us have other duties to fit in.  Arranging training around busy and part time schedules can be a nightmare.  It took me a long time to get colleagues trained up.

·        Don’t be afraid to play – Time spent creating dummy requests to see if your planned workflow is efficient is never wasted.  Spending time doing this, even after the new ILL system was introduced has saved me creating problems.  The flaws in your ideas are clear before they can cause problems on live requests.

·        Be in for the long haul – this is a never ending process

Happy ILLing

Karen

Bedding in a new ILL Management System

Warning:  Royal Mail Special Delivery - Signed for

I would have called this Recorded Delivery, and expected some sort of tracking, otherwise what is the point?

However we have just discovered that even though an item is collected from the Library, there is absolutely no tracking (not even in behind the scenes) until the item has arrived at its destination and been signed for.  I'm finding it difficult to work out the logic of this, other than to see who has signed for it (if you can make out the scrawl) and therefore work out which department it has maybe ended up in. 

In the meantime, the book that was lent to us in good faith by the Institute of Education in London is out there somewhere and no-one has a clue where it is......

I've now been directed to form P58 to claim for a lost item....   Joy for a Friday afternoon!  Have a good weekend.

“Oh, you’re a Librarian?  I guess that’s a nice job sitting reading books, is it?”

How often have we heard that?  Well, if the last 2 weeks are anything to go by, nothing could be further from the truth.

Tuesday 14^th October:  Two of us in the department with a 3rd colleague on leave:  not a problem, and everything goes swimmingly all morning;  nice, peaceful lunch in the staffroom with my Ian Rankin novel;  back to my desk at one o'clock to let my colleague Louise away for her lunch;  just settled down to process the BL Intray;  phone rings.....  “I’ve just received overdues for 2 books which I returned in June, and I’ve been blocked from using ILLiad”.  Ok, there must be a mistake, so I check her record….  As I thought, both books have been safely returned…..   Oh, there’s the other phone….. Louise gets caught before going for her lunch….. someone else, same problem.     Then… oh my goodness, it was as if someone had taken over our pcs as the emails began flooding onto the screen, all with the same message  “Re:  Overdue Item;  Blocked on ILLiad”. 

It turned out that during some maintenance that we’d requested, something had been switched on or off (not sure which!), causing ILLiad to throw a major tantrum and issue hundreds of incorrect “Final” overdue notices which threaten  the recipients with massive bills for replacement and with being blocked from ILLiad..

To cut a long, tedious story short, chaos reigned for the remainder of the afternoon as we answered the phone calls and attempted to keep up with the replies to the emails.  Poor Louise had to eat her lunch between in-coming calls, and had developed quite a patter by the end of the day!    Alerts were put out on every conceivable place on the website and Twitter, with an out-of-office message on our departmental email, which at least bought us time in which to respond.

 

Inspite of the mayhem, it was very interesting to see the range of reactions expressed –from “oh, I’m terribly sorry for not returning this; I’ll do it immediately” to outrage that we’d dared to cause them such alarm.  

A welcome break for a FIL committee meeting followed the next day, and then it was back to our Library Annexe on the Thursday.  AHH….. peace and quiet at last:  no phone calls or visits to my desk, and time to catch up with those tasks on the “to do” list. 
Not a bit of it:  This, that and the next tradesman decided that this was the day to visit the Annexe, a massive leak was discovered in the roof as the result of torrential rain the previous weekend, and then just to top it all, the burglar alarm decided to play up when I closed at 5, causing me to miss my train.

I’m back at the Library Annexe today, and so far, so good……….

Perils of travelling......

It only seems like yesterday that we were at the Interlend conference in Edinburgh and here we are this week planning next year's conference in Manchester.  It was great to welcome the newbies to the committee but sad to say bye bye to 'old' outgoing members of the committee.

I remember my first committee meeting and feeling quite daunted by it all. Wondering what I could contribute to the group and what my role would be. The newbies have quickly got involved with the committee and with very little arm wrestling have taken on their new roles. The website will soon be updated and you'll know who is doing what.

I think the hardest part of the first committee meeting is deciding the the theme of the next conference. Once that is decided we can think about who to invite as our keynote speakers and the programme then starts taking shape. I think we got lots of ideas on the table to take forward so look out for the call for speakers in the near future.

Anyway - moving on the perils of travelling......Do you find that if you go on journeys with certain people you know that it is not going to be straight forward? There's one colleague in work with me and another is our outgoing FIL Chair, Marie. As we are both from South Wales we regularly travel part of the way together to committee meetings and conferences. Guaranteed when Marie is with me, we just get out of Birmingham New Street and the train stops and we're stuck for hours.  The best, though, had to be our journey after we left Edinburgh. We couldn't have any normal taxi driver!  Please follow this link and you'll see what I mean

http://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/city-taxi-driver-dons-comedy-nose-and-gets-out-puppets-to-entertain-and-sometimes-scare-passengers-1-2695468

He was totally bonkers!

We got to the airport to find that of all the flights that were cancelled out of Edinburgh, cos of the French air strike, it had to be ours going to Bristol.

We were put up in a grotty Travelodge in Edinburgh (I don't normally object to Travelodges but this one was pretty ropey). As you can see, even FIL the frog was fed up by then.

Anyway, despite all the calamities, it will be strange travelling on my ownsome.

So bye bye 'oldies' and many thanks for all your hard work and shw mae (hello) to our newbies.  Welcome to the FIL committee!

Where did summer go?

Wow, doesn’t time fly? It doesn’t seem that long ago since my last blog post but that was way back in July! So what’s happened since then….?

Copyright : I suppose the biggest thing to happen is that due to the new Copyright Law, we now no longer pay any attention to restrictions in our licences for supplying  ejournals (yay!) This saves us so much time and effort when trying to fill requests for other libraries. I think it’s such a big change that some libraries still aren’t sure about it and I have to admit, as much as I wanted to rip up the pages in the manual that stated that we must check the licences as soon as I got back from the FIL conference, I had to wait until our Deputy Director had ‘rubber stamped’ it. Hopefully everyone will come on board soon and our stats for unfilled ILLs (due to other libraries only having ejournal holdings) should go down by quite a bit!

Independence referendum: Well, I have to admit, I did have some major concerns about how our ILL service would function if Scotland had chosen to be an independent country! Whilst most people were thinking about how much tax we would have to pay/what currency we would use I was thinking –

“oh no! we’ve just sorted out the copyright law, now we’ll have to start all over again!”

“Will BL charge us international rates?”

“Will we have to stock up on IFLA vouchers to borrow from libraries in England?”

You know, the really important stuff!

However, things didn’t go that way and we’re carrying on like it never happened, but it could have been very different……

Library Refurbishment : since way back before the summer, work had been going on upstairs on refurbishing level 3 of the library. Cue lots of drilling, walls being demolished, fear of workmen falling through ceilings onto our desks etc. Only a week behind schedule, the floor was officially opened last week. There are a number of booth style study spaces, lots of individual desks and the main attraction – a huge glass box in the middle of the room which houses our vastly reduced short loan collection– now rebranded High Demand Collection! It will certainly be interesting to see how things go as the staff are still based on level 2…..

Charging for uncollected ILLs : well, so far so good. We decided that we would charge our readers £5 for each book they ordered but did not collect/consult.  Since 1^st August, we’ve sent out 56 reminder notices that books had arrived and not been collected/consulted after 8 days, and to date, only added the £5 charge 6 times! Previously, we were dealing with approx 30 uncollected/unconsulted books per month!  I think people are starting to realise that ILLs aren’t actually ‘free’…..

I’m looking forward to my first FIL meeting next week. Slightly scared about taking on the role of Secretary but I’m sure I’ll settle into it! See you all soon!

Joanne