At last week's WLA conference in Wisconsin Dells, WLA's Resource Sharing Roundtable sponsored a program titled Resource Sharing Among Wisconsin Public Libraries. The presenters were Christine Barth and Martha Farley Berninger from RL&LL, Charles Clemence from Winding Rivers, Bob Shaw from WiLS, and Maureen Welch from Indianhead Library System.
This session offered a panel discussion of resource sharing practices and patterns among Wisconsin's public libraries.Representatives of the Reference and Loan Library, WiLS, and Winding Rivers Library System, shared their viewpoints on the best practices in resource sharing. The panel described some of the functional and procedural models currently in place and discussed the workflow and customer service ramifications of those models. Attendees were encouraged to share their experiences and their feedback on the efficacy of the resource sharing practices now in place in the state.
Bob and Martha presented the results of a survey that was sent in the spring to the heads of resource sharing at the seventeen library systems. Review their presentation (pdf).
Charles, Maureen, and Christine provided examples of how resource sharing works in their respective shops. View Christine's presentation (pdf) and Maureen's presentation (Word)
November 2010 Calendar
December 6 & 8, 2010; 1-3 p.m. CT
ILL Basics Online Course
This course will cover the basics of using the OCLC WorldCat Resource Sharing system for Interlibrary Loan. The course in online format will be delivered over 2 days consisting of two hour long sessions as a lecture demo with hands on homework exercises of about another 1 hour per day. There is a supporting website included. For more information about the 2010-2011 schedule and registration, see the training portal
December 13 & 15 2010; 1-3 p.m. CT
ILL Tricks Online Course
The ILL Basics course covers using the OCLC WorldCat resource sharing system for interlibrary loan; the ILL Tricks course improves staff's efficiency using the OCLC WorldCat Resource Sharing system for ILL. Emphasis is on advanced techniques, new features and enhancements. For more information about the 2010-2011 schedule and registration, see the training portal.
ILL Tips
In a recent conversation with an ILL staff member at a Wisconsin academic library, he told me that he has been getting 20% of his articles free by first using "Google Scholar" in searching article requests. So if this is not part of your routine, try it and see if it works for you. For ILLiad libraries, having "Google Scholar" as part of your add-ons is very cool — if you have questions regarding add-ons, contact Eric Robinson at WiLS.
ShareILL — Although it looks like it does not get modified very often, there are still lots of good resources in ShareILL — a web-based gateway to electronic and print resources relating to all aspects of interlibrary loan (ILL), document delivery, and resource sharing.
A new tool for developing custom holdings has been developed from the IDS Project Workflow Toolkit — toolkit.idsproject.org. According to the documentation, "This Excel spreadsheet is comprised of data taken from the Policies Directory, but with sortable and filterable fee data. This allows you to pinpoint free and fee lenders for your institution. Since not all library fees are one-size-fits-all, libraries with conditional fees are isolated so that you can still easily compile groups with flat-fee charges." See Custom Holdings. This looks to be the solution to easily generating custom holdings groups on the basis of cost which is not possible within the OCLC policy directory.
The IDS Project Workflow Toolkit also has a hint about setting up a fulltext custom holdings group.
Here is what they said: "Did you know that Google Books and the Internet Archive have OCLC symbols? You can use these symbols in a custom holdings group to discover their free full text holdings cataloged in WorldCat. When searching for books in WorldCat, use this custom holdings group whenever you see the items appear with the format of Internet Resource. Depending on which symbol appears, you can search either website for the title and provide the URL to your user with an email routing."
The OCLC symbol for Google is GOOGL and the OCLC symbol for the Internet Archive is INARC.
- Bob Shaw
Minitex and Custom Holdings
When devising your custom holdings groups, you should consider having Minitex as part of your groups. With the WiLS/Minitex agreement, public libraries in Wisconsin and the Minitex network (Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota) borrow and lend on a reciprical basis— no charge.
For academic libraries, the charge to borrow and lend is $6.55IFM (for 2010-2011). For staff at LVIS academic libraries in Wisconsin, you have to determine the relative advantages of getting material through the SCLS Red Box Delivery system from Minitex for $6.55IFM vs. the cost of postage to LVIS libraries outside of Wisconsin.
Minitex has a page on their website that gives the specific OCLC symbols for Avs, monographs, and serials. You can simply copy and paste those symbols into your custom holdings groups.
There are some other details about sending requests to Minitex, e.g, how many times to put MII in the lending string. That information can be found on the WiLS web page.
If you have any questions regarding this, please contact me at reshaw@wils.wisc.edu.
- Bob Shaw
OCLC for ILL
Changes in OCLC Resource Sharing
A couple of nice changes have been recently seen in OCLC Resource Sharing. The ILL community should start to see quarterly enhancements to the service because OCLC has stated that these more timely enhancements will "save staff time and continue [to] simplify and improve the WorldCat Resource Sharing service." On Nov. 7th, the follow enhancements were made:
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The subfield h of the 245 MARC field will be added to the workform. This subfield is the indicator of the format of the item. Indicating the format of the item in the workform will make it easier for staff to quickly determine the format of the item to know whether or not the item is available for lending.
- Libraries will be able to select up to 10 additional libraries that will be added to the workform in the "Affiliations" field. This allows the borrowing library to use these additional lenders if the request goes unfilled without having to search and display holdings again.
- Borrowing libraries using Direct Request will be able to see their local holdings information in the "My Library's Holding" field of the workform allowing them to know that the item requested by their user is available in their library.
OCLC Knowledge Base
The integration of a new WorldCat knowledge base with WorldCat simplifies the way your library shares electronic resources such as journal articles and eBooks. The result is time savings for your library staff and faster access to electronic resources for the people who need them.
The combination of WorldCat Resource Sharing or ILLiad and the WorldCat knowledge base ensures that your library initiates copy requests only for items not available in your own collections and helps your staff more efficiently process incoming requests for electronic articles you own and are licensed to loan.
Resource sharing enhancements enabled by the new knowledge base are available to libraries that subscribe to OCLC Cataloging and the WorldCat Resource Sharing or ILLiad service.
Once your library has added its local knowledge base data into the WorldCat knowledge base, you will begin to benefit from new functionality that includes:
- Enhanced lending display for e-articles
ILL requests include a direct link to requested electronic articles. Lending library staffs click on that link to connect directly to an article PDF.
- Direct Request for articles
When both a borrowing and lending library using Direct Request have loaded their local knowledge bases into the WorldCat knowledge base, the system identifies lending libraries more accurately and passes the URL of the needed item directly to the lending library in the ILL request. This eliminates the tedious manual steps of consulting multiple service interfaces to locate a needed item and then consulting a separate source to determine policies set by content providers that govern lending.
In many cases, use of the new feature means that ILL staff can complete a loan transaction without ever leaving their desk.
- Eric Robinson
A monthly publication with writing contributions by Fran Metcalf, Angela Milock, Joy Pohlman, Jane Richard, Eric Robinson, Bob Shaw, Al Wenzel, 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
