Walter Library was one of over twenty buildings designed by architect Clarence H. Johnston (1859-1936) for the University of Minnesota.
Resource Sharing & Delivery News
The 25th Annual Minitex ILL Conference was held on Tuesday, May 10, 2016, at the Saint Paul Campus of the University of Minnesota. There were around 180 attendees from the Minitex region. The keynote, "What's Next for Libraries" was delivered by Lee Rainie, Director of Internet, Science and Technology at Pew Research Center.
The University Library Twin Cities has moved about 62,000 volumes from Wilson Library and the Health Sciences Library to off-site storage. These titles have been identified as "low use."
Working with University Library staff, Minitex now has an efficient way to retrieve these materials
Beginning June 1st Minitex shifted four locations from overnight delivery to On-Demand service. This is a service provided by Alliance Courier for Minitex locations that have fewer items in their daily delivery.
At the Minitex Interlibrary Loan Conference on May 10th, Lee Rainie from the Pew Research Center touched on a statistic that caught my interest. Across the nation, requests for physical items in public and academic libraries have had a steady decrease over the past 4 years. Rainie also noted that those numbers are beginning to level out.
Jennie Shaw will be presenting a poster on a digital exhibit of the John Philip Borger Comic Book Collection at the Minnesota eLearning Summit on July 27.
OCLC will discontinue its support and testing of Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 9 and 10 with its WorldCat Discovery and WorldShare applications beginning July 1, 2016.
If you are interested in issues around equity and diversity—from how history is represented and whose stories get told, to access to education and arts resources—Code Switch is for you.
Whether interlibrary loan (ILL) should include textbooks in the scope of their borrowing and lending policies has been an issue for many years.In the past, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities ILL Borrowing office cancelled requests for textbooks. In effect, our office spent years intentionally denying service to our users. While we were busy cancelling textbook requests manually, patrons were borrowing them anyway through our direct request programs. Both the workflow of ILL and our users’ needs were pointing toward a much-needed change.
My most experienced student just told me she ordered her cap and gown. This is a bittersweet time of year; I really enjoy working with my student employees, but I don't get to keep them after they graduate. They inevitably move on to "real jobs," though once in a while that turns out to be joining the regular Minitex staff. Others may end up in related fields, or stay in touch on social media, so I don't have to miss them entirely.
The rich resources of Minnesota libraries, available to patrons and libraries in every corner of Minnesota