by Carol Nelson
Quick Summary
What would need to change with our current interlibrary loan (ILL) request systems in order to create an easy to use patron-centric ILL system? A group of library staff hope to inspire vendors of ILL products to work toward that goal.
What would need to change with our current interlibrary loan (ILL) request systems in order to create an easy to use patron-centric ILL system? A group of library staff* from the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) hope to inspire vendors of discovery and ILL products as well as resource sharing staff to work toward that goal with their November 2016 report A Vision for Next Generation Resource Delivery.
Today's ILL systems usually don’t work well with our discovery services so they can be very confusing for patrons to navigate. Our systems and policies can create roadblocks for patrons to getting the resources they need. The group’s authors envisage the development of ILL and discovery products that would eliminate the need for patrons to understand the often complex system(s) at work when they request items from the library. For some library patrons, it is necessary to know when they should be using a campus document delivery versus interlibrary loan, or even when they need to go to a different site to place a request when their library has a reciprocal borrowing agreement in place that could fulfill their request (like MNLINK).
Ideally, a patron would only need to logon to a single system to make a request, and software would route the request to the appropriate workflow for library staff to process. That could be accomplished by encouraging vendors to cooperate to develop better interoperability, the use of APIs, Z39.50 and by vendors getting more input from users on feature development.
Learn more about how the vision could become a reality in the full report, or the summary.
*The report was written by the BTAA Discovery to Delivery Project Action Committee Members: Bruce Barton, University of Wisconsin; Melissa Eighmy Brown, University of Minnesota; Zoe Chao, Penn State University; Kurt Munson, Northwestern University; and Ken Varnum University of Michigan. In the photo above: Kurt Munson and Melissa Eighmy Brown present on the vision report at the 2017 OCLC Resource Sharing Conference.
