January 2009

CONTENTS      

Upcoming Events

Spring semester is here!

Take a look at the online courses on offer from MINITEX, Network Education Exchange and OCLC Western.

WiLS has scheduled free information online sessions of WiLS Hours, Catalogers' Clatsches, and VR Best Practices for 2009.

Resource Sharing News

ShareILL

ShareILL If you haven't made a new year's resolution yet, a good one would be to take advantage of ShareILL during the coming year. This website is a comprehensive tool that is divided into three sections: finding aids and verification tools, tools to manage your ILL operation, and current awareness tools.

Finding aids and tools

Managing your ILL operation

Keeping current

ILLWeb began as a website that was created by Mary Hollerich in 2001 but migrated to a wiki, ShareILL, in June, 2007. You can add links to current pages or if you don't find what you are looking for, you can even create a new page! It's a great resource for one-stop shopping in interlibrary loan.

Please contact me at reshaw@wils.wisc.edu.

- Bob Shaw


Call for Papers: Resource Sharing & Information Networks,
Volume 20 (1 & 2)

Resource Sharing & Information Networks is now accepting manuscript submissions. The deadline for submission of papers is Wednesday, February 8, 2009 for publication in Spring 2009 and Wednesday, June 24, 2009 for Fall 2009. Submissions should follow the Instructions to Authors available at www.informaworld.com/WRSI and should be emailed directly to the Editor, Dr. Barbara J. Stites at bstites@fgcu.edu. Thematic issues will be considered: Guest Editors interested in proposed theme issues should send an outline for such projects to the Editor.

Specific areas for article development include:

Administration and Leadership of Networks, Cooperatives, and Consortia:
Organizational Development
Board Development
Finance and Accounting
Marketing
Advocacy
Human Resource Development

Resource Sharing:
Access to shared resources
Reciprocal Borrowing
Interlibrary Loan
Document Delivery
Unmediated Borrowing
Electronic Resource Management Systems (ERMS)

Training and Continuing Education:
Development and Design
Implementation and Evaluation
Assessment

Blended Learning:
Online plus F2F

New Academic/Industry Roles & Economics:
Institutional repositories
Linking of institutional repositories
FTE Pricing
Agency Role vs. Order Direct

Cooperative Purchasing:
New models
Trends

Negotiations:
First offers
Exchanges of consideration
Shared goals
Success-driven compromise

New International Roles for Consortia:
Equitable access to information for developing economies
Social responsibilities of developed economies
Special regions: East Europe & Russia; China; Africa

New Publisher Roles:
Growing role of consortia in the new serial economy
Integration of electronic serials with continuing e-book programs
Combination of publisher full-text with licensed full-text

- Barbara J. Stites, Ph.D. Editor
Resource Sharing & Information Networks

Backing-Up Ariel 4.1.1 With WinBatch

One of the tasks that WiLS ILL does on a weekly basis is back-up the Ariel files that have been "sent". This has become necessary because every so often the recipient of the Ariel transmission needs the file resent, and it is much more cost efficient to retrieve a file from the back-up network directory and resend, than it is to retrieve the journal and rescan the item.

Previously this was an involved process. First, the desired files in the Ariel "Send" queue were highlighted, and then an Ariel "File / Save" operation was performed. This would put a copy of all of the files to be saved into the "Archive" queue of Ariel (which corresponds to the Ariel "SAVED" Windows directory). Next, using Windows Explorer, the ILL Staff would copy the files from the Ariel "SAVED" Windows directory to a directory on our network, creating it if necessary in the process, and giving it a name using the current date. Lastly, back in Ariel, the items in the "Archive" queue were deleted, as well as those files originally selected in the Ariel "Send" queue. This process was repeated for each of our three Ariel 4.1.1 workstations.

This operation was tedious and complex. It was hard to train new students to do this job effectively. The process was time consumptive, usually taking over an 1 hour.

The WiLS ILL Staff wanted a more automated way to accomplish this task, that would involve many fewer steps by the ILL Staff, and would be quicker to run. We ended up writing a program in WinBatch that accomplished much of the process, and in a shorter timeframe. WinBatch, from Wilson Windowware, is a Windows programming language that is very powerfull, and that allows you to automate many processes that would normally have to be done manually within Windows.

The WinBatch program we wrote takes all of the files in the Ariel "OUT" Windows directory, looks at the GEDI header of each file for the "Document Id" information, copies the file to a network directory you specify, creating the directory in the process if necessary, using the "Document Id" as the filename. It looks for any error conditions, and reports them to the User as well as logging the information. The process takes about 5 minutes per 300 entries in the Ariel "Send" queue, and reports on it's progress while running to the user. The program runs in the background.

After the WinBatch program finishes, the User still needs to delete those items from the Ariel "Send" queue that have been successfully sent, but this takes relatively little time.

WiLS ILL has been using this program for about four weeks now, and have been quite happy with it. If you have any questions, and/or would like to see a copy of the source code, I'd be happy to oblige (alwenzel at wils.wisc.edu).

- Allen Wenzel

Reference Service News

Greetings Reference Folk, Here are just a few of our latest available resources through UW DIGITAL COLLECTIONS:

NEW RESOURCES WITHIN EXISTING COLLECTIONS
The Aldo Leopold Archives 10 issues, 10,384 pages, added 11/4/2008. Funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the Aldo Leopold Archive houses the raw materials that document not only Leopold's rise to prominence but the history of conservation and the emergence of the field of ecology from the early 1900s until his death in 1948. These additions represent Series 9/25/10-5: Research Areas and Projects. Most of the areas and projects in this series represent ongoing research efforts instituted by Leopold, usually in cooperation with others, and carried on under his supervision by a succession of graduate students. The bulk of the material pertains to research accomplished before World War II forced curtailment.

Digital Library of Decorative Arts Illustrations of the family of Psittacidae, or parrots: the greater part of them species hitherto unfigured, containing forty-two lithographic plates, drawn from life, and on stone 1 issue, 104 pages, added 11/4/2008 Edward Lear (1812-1888) began his art career while still a teenager. Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots (1832), containing 42 large-format ornithological illustrations, was published before he was 20 years old. The volume is remarkable for its folio size and for content focused on a single family of birds. Under the patronage of Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby, Lear was able to travel abroad and develop his talents as a landscape painter. The original volume scanned for our online facsimile is held at UW-Madison, Memorial Library Special Collections, at Thordarson T 3524.

Foreign Relations of the United States of America 3 issues, 3,324 pages, added 10/21/08 The Foreign Relations of the United States series is the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions that have been declassified and edited for publication. The series is produced by the State Department's Office of the Historian and printed volumes are available from the Government Printing Office. New additions include Papers relating to the foreign relations of the United States, transmitted to congress with the annual message of the president, December 2, 1872, Volume I, Foreign relations of United States, 1894, affairs in Hawaii, and Foreign relations of the United States, 1901, affairs in China.

History Collection Documents Relating to the Negotiation of Ratified and Unratified Treaties with Various Indian Tribes, 1801-1869 408 issues, 8,929 pages, added 11/18/08 American Indian treaties, like all treaties in American history, require ratification by the United States Senate to become law. Treaties negotiated with Indian peoples in the United States (the original treaties are part of record group 11, which is not currently digitized) are often a valuable source of information for researchers interested in American Indian policy. So too are the supplementary documents that offer context and additional information for the treaties. This collection has been created from the microfilm of record group 75, records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, specifically RG 75, Microcopy T494. These ten reels include instructions to treaty commissioners, reports, letters, and in some cases copies of the treaties. To facilitate use of the collection, descriptions from the List of documents relating to the negotiation of ratified and unratified treaties with various Indian Tribes, 1801-1869, a printed finding aid produced by the National Archives, have been entered beneath each treaty title. This information lists the instructions, records of treaty council proceedings and correspondence for each treaty where such exists and was included in the original National Archives record set.

STATE OF WISCONSIN COLLECTION
History of Wisconsin Agriculture and Rural Life 42 issues, 16, 957 pages, added 10/21/2008 The History of Wisconsin Agriculture and Rural Life collection is based on a bibliography compiled as part of the National Preservation Project for Agricultural Literature. Items in the bibliography, primary and secondary materials published through 1945, were initially ranked by a review panel for preservation microfilming. The latest additions include the Transactions of the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society.

Waterford Area Local History 43 issues, 4,738 pages, 106 images, added10/21/08 Western Racine County pioneer families began staking their claims in the Waterford area in the fall of 1836. The early years of settlement are documented here by a collection of historical artifacts digitized from a variety of formats including books, manuscripts, photographs, maps and newspapers. These additions include The Emerald, Waterford's high school yearbook, for the 1940s through the 1980s. The Waterford Area Local History Collection was funded, in part, through grants from the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) in 2006 and 2008.

UW-La Crosse Historic Steamboat Photograph Collection 1,129 images, added 11/4/2008 The UW-La Crosse Historic Steamboat Photograph collection consists of over 40,000 black and white photographic images of steamboats on the inland waterways of the United States, primarily the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri rivers and their tributaries. The photos depict steamboats in every phase of their life span, in every aspect of their daily operations from the 1850s to the present, and in all sorts of settings as they went about their everyday business of hauling freight and passengers and towing barges and rafts. Besides steamboats, other types of images in the collection include steamboat captains, engineers, pilots, passengers and crews; city and town waterfronts; levees; locks and dams; and river-related activities such as fishing, swimming and clamming. The digitized collection now has over 4,600 images online.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN COLLECTION
Selections from the University of Wisconsin Archives 103 images, added 10/21/2008 and 11/4/2008 The University Archives holds an impressive collection of historic images that document topics such as Chancellors and Presidents, Memorial Union, Student Activities, and Athletics. The most recent additions focus on student protest and the University. This image collection now has over 840 images and continues to grow.

The Memorial Union Terrace: A Landscape History 1 issue, 75 pages, added 11/18/08 The formal dedication of the Memorial Union took place on October 5th, 1928, but this history of one of the UWÕs most iconic locations examines what stood at this site prior to the Union as well as the expansion, renewal, and other changes that occurred after the UnionÕs founding. With pictures, map and other historic documents, this volume shows the dynamism of the Memorial Union Terrace.

This volume is also available through Minds@UW at digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/30750

Please let us know if we can be of service. Thank you.

--Fran Metcalf, fmetcalf at wils.wisc.edu
Phone: 608.263.4981
Fax: 608.263.3684
Submit a reference request

OCLC for ILL

Have you heard about QUICK?

Have you noticed QUICK as a lender in OCLC? If so, have you tried them yet? If not, maybe all you need to know is:

QUICK is actually Better World Books, a unique book vendor that has partnered with WorldCat Direct to deliver materials requested through OCLC directly to patrons. Even though your library may not be a pilot library for WorldCat Direct, you are able to use QUICK as a potential lender. Materials sent from QUICK have a 30 day lending period, come with a pre-paid return envelope, and are available for purchase at any time.


Quick
Quick Book Label

University of Wisconsin-Madison has been sending requests to QUICK for awhile. The turnaround time is exceptional, returning the item is a breeze, and more importantly, they have an outstanding fill rate. While we are not purchasing the materials, and have yet to have a patron do so, we have not ruled either out as a possibility. We are eagerly awaiting the results of the WorldCat Direct pilot in hopes of helping us move in that direction. For more information on QUICK and the WorldCat Direct pilot, visit WorldCatDirectFAQ.html or contact Heather Weltin (hweltin at library.wisc.edu).

- Heather Weltin

An irregular publication with writing contributions by Fran Metcalf, Joy Pohlman, Eric Robinson, Bob Shaw, Heather Weltin, Al Wenzel, Mary Williamson, and Sheila Zillner.

Edited by Bob Shaw and Joy Pohlman.
Layout, graphics by S. C. Zillner.

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WiLS ILL phone—608.263.4981; email—wilsill@wils.wisc.edu
WiLS ILL—728 State Street, Room B106B, Madison, WI 53706