Resource sharing redesign - request verification

By the time I was twenty, I had already racked up a pretty impressive list of jobs I found dreary, among them, picking apples, canning corn, cooking at A&W, and cashiering. When I became a student at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, my job opportunities expanded. The most interesting position I applied for was at Minitex, located in the basement of Wilson Library. I got an interview and had high hopes, but I wasn’t hired. 

My interviewers shared my schedule with another hiring supervisor and it turned out to be perfect for a different position in the office. A few weeks later, on  Halloween day, 1977, I started my first day of work as Minitex student worker. On that day, I never would have guessed I would still be working at Minitex 40 years later.

For my first student job, I distributed incoming interlibrary loan requests into cubbies corresponding to each campus library. Minitex staff would pick up the requests and head out to libraries on campus to make copies or retrieve loans. For requests received without a campus location already noted I would start to look for holding locations.  

In those days, that involved alphabetizing the requests by author or title and then heading upstairs to check the University of Minnesota’s card catalog. The card catalog took up an impressive amount of space on the first floor of Wilson Library. If the request was for a serial, I’d also check it in Minnesota Union List of Serials (MULS) fiche, and then double check it in case there happened to be a handwritten update in the office’s print set of bound MULS volumes. 

Today, we still need to get requests out to the various libraries on campus. The difference is that most of that process is now handled using technology. Mira, developed in-house by our IT staff, “auto-verifies” locations from the University’s online catalog, MnCAT. Those requests can be accessed and printed at the point of need. The system sorts the auto-verified requests into queues accessed by Minitex Resource Sharing staff on site at the various libraries. In addition to speeding up the entire process, it gives staff the option of heading directly to their work location instead of stopping at the main office in Wilson first. Those staff members do still return to the office with returnable items so they can be quickly moved into the delivery system.

Almost all of our other processes have been updated and automated since the days when Wilson Library still contained its enormous card catalog. I’ll share how we have redesigned and reengineered some of our other processes in future posts.