December 2008

Events
Resource Sharing News
Reference Service News
OCLC for ILL

Past Issues

January 23-28, 2009
2009 ALA Midwinter Meeting, Denver, CO

The WiLS staff is pleased to welcome aboard  Angela Milock, our new ILL research intern. Angela will be working in the interlibrary loan department and her main duties will be overseeing our scanning, document delivery, and RapidILL operations.

Angela received her undergraduate degree from UW-Parkside with a major in English and graduated from UW-Madison's School of Library and Information Studies with an MLS degree last May.  While in library school she volunteered at the LGBT center and worked as a student assistant in the biology and journalism reading room libraries and the Digital Collection Center.  She was also co-chair of the Jail Library Group (which recently celebrated its fifteenth anniversary) that provides reading material to inmates at the Dane County jail.

In her spare time Angela likes reading young adult literature and crocheting.  And earlier this week she and her husband received word that their offer on a house on Madison's north side was accepted so they will shortly be new homeowners!

Angela can be reached by email at amilock@wils.wisc.edu. 

WiLS ILL Services is proud to announce a new service — Digitization on Demand. We have set up a system for institutions around the world to be able to submit requests either via ILL or through a web form to have complete works within Special Collections" digitized. The outcome of the project would be that patrons who would not be able to get access to specialized research materials would get access, and the University of Wisconsin would get a preservation copy of the work for furthering accessibility to items previously unviewed and untapped by average library users. This would fill a role of "on demand" preservation scanning that the university currently does not have. Many requests for materials in the special collections already come through the normal ILL channels WiLS maintains at this point so obtaining these types of requests will be second nature. From there the staff will pull, scan, and send the work to the requesting institution, and the UWDCG will coordinate the preservation metadata and hosting of the digitized preservation piece.

We are very excited about this joint venture with the University of Wisconsin. It will provide more works for educational purposes now and into the future. WiLS sees this as just a small but important step at again meeting the Wisconsin Idea — we are trying to improve the standard of living for the citizens of the state and world.

--Eric Robinson

Are any of these a significant part of your job?
• resource sharing
• interlibrary loan
• document delivery

If so consider joining the Resource Sharing Round Table (RSRT) when sending in your WLA dues this month. As part of your basic membership, you are allowed to choose two sections/round tables to join. For more information about the RSRT see the WLA home page and the October newsletter.

--Bob Shaw

Within a couple of months WiLS will be rolling out a new web page.  As the ILL liaison to the Web Page Design committee, I'd like to get some feedback from WiLS members about the content and design of the ILL pages.  If you would like to be involved in critiquing the new design, please contact me at reshaw@wils.wisc.edu.

            - Bob Shaw

Review from WiLS' Reference Coordinator
Tuesday November 18th, I attended the Reference and Loan Fall Reference Meeting for Public Library Systems and Resource Libraries.

We started off with a discussion of the COLAND Visioning Summit. Among the many issues raised community involvement was discussed at our meeting. The suggestion was made that a librarian should be at council meetings to share information. This has had some success when it has been tried. The problem is staffing allocation, time and money. The Ward study showing $4.06 returning to the community for every $1.00 spent on libraries was also mentioned. It was agreed that we need to do more to communicate our value to those who pay for our service. More outreach needs to be done, expecially to job centers, considering the present economy. This is a crisis/opportunity moment.

Most of us are using AskAway, and are pleased with the software. The problem, if there is one, is finding time for staff to monitor AskAway. It was agreed that we are serving those who might not have reached us otherwise. Numbers are up. Even those who resisted Chat Reference at first are now convinced.

In the afternoon there were presentations about CCIC (Child Care Information Center) Geneaology, and Wisconsin State Government resources. Each of these had excellent handouts, which I am sure R&L would be happy to share with any who requested them.

--Fran Metcalf
fmetcalf at wils.wisc.edu
Phone: 608.263.4981
Fax: 608.263.3684

If you need to switch to "non-supplier" status on OCLC ILL during upcoming staff shortages or vacations, you can do so from within the Policies Directory. The link is available on the Unit Summary, Quick View, and Information screens. As a non-supplier, your library's OCLC symbol appears in lower-case and other libraries may not use your symbol when creating their lender strings.

Keep in mind that the non-referral days for Worldcat Resource Sharing are:

     Christmas Eve
     Christmas Day
     New Year's Eve
     New Year's Day
     Thanksgiving
     Day after Thanksgiving

Recommendations if you switch to ILL non-supplier:
1. Change to non-supplier a week or so before you HAVE to be unavailable for ILL. If your symbol has already been included in active requests before the non-supplier change, you could get items in your message file that need attention. Please check your message file even after you go to non-supplier status.

2. Continue to check the MF regularly and automatically answer "No" to any new requests that show up. Use reasons for "No" 15 "requested delivery services not supported" or 10 "preferred delivery time not possible" if you want to track these kinds of requests.

--Mark Beatty
mbeatty at wils.wisc.edu

As usual if you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact us at WiLS.
phone—608.263.4981
email—wilsill@wils.wisc.edu