A few Minitex staff recently had an opportunity to meet with representatives from OCLC (Katie Birch and Don Bohn) to show them how we use ILLiad. ILLiad is one of six systems that Minitex uses to process interlibrary loan (ILL) requests. The other ILL systems used in our office are Aleph, OCLC (WorldShare), VDX, Wiscat, and web requests.
In Minitex, we use ILLiad to handle lending through the University of Minnesota, primarily to libraries outside of our region. We have recently begun accepting requests from some of the Minitex OCLC WMS libraries. This was our opportunity to showcase the work that Minitex does to create, as much as possible, a unified workflow across all systems and demonstrate what our development needs are for Tipasa. Borrowing staff from the University of Minnesota Libraries also met with OCLC staff for demonstrations and discussion.
I highlighted and demonstrated the processing from ILLiad we want to keep or that we would like to see work better as ILLiad libraries transition to Tipasa. We are always assessing our workflows to make sure we can respond to requests as quickly as possible. As we anticipate the transition to Tipasa we want to make sure we will be able to continue to provide quick turn around time. That's why I was excited to show OCLC how we prepare loan requests in ILLiad to be auto-verified on our internal request management system. By using this method to verify loan requests we are able to fill loan requests quicker because we are not spending as much time on verification. In addition to auto-verification, we were able to show how we use ILLiad along with our internal system to distribute and update our requests and where we use add-ons or hotkeys to automate as much of the process as possible.
