The 26th Annual Minitex Interlibrary Loan Conference was held on Wednesday, May 17 at the Continuing Education and Conference Center on the Saint Paul Campus of the University of Minnesota. There were 180 attendees at this event. The keynote speaker was J.Jeff Kober, President of Performance Journeys and CEO of World Class Benchmarking. Kober's keynote, "Things I Wish I Could Tell My Librarian," offered insights to improve the experience of library patrons. He talked about the need to have a clear message that all staff in an organization can get behind. One library he worked with chose "We inspire discovery." A lot of us were talking about what those three words would be for our organization. Kober also led a breakout session titled “Understanding the Compass of Your Library Patron.” Both sessions offered glimpses into the customer service approach taken at Disney where Kober has spent a good deal of his career.
Katie Birch of OCLC presented on the changes OCLC is bringing to their options for interlibrary loan products with the introduction of Tipasa and the acquisition of Relais. Statistics were the subject of Valerie Horton’s presentation as she covered topics ranging from smartphone use to e-books to the need to use reputable sources for statistics. There were three breakout sessions in addition to that of Kober. These included: Discovery to Delivery: Ideas for creating a better experience for library users, a Minitex Update, and MNLINK 2.0: Searching with OCLC’s WorldCat Discovery. Evaluations have been sent out and the response to the event so far has been overwhelmingly positive.
