[ILL-L] mailing over Christmas and in process holds

[Mary Lehane]

Hi Joanna,
1. We stopped "holding back" mail about ten years ago. Many years ago it 
was a common practice. We have not noticed any more losses at this time 
of year.
One of the reasons we changed our procedure was that we had no place to 
hold all the material and our shipping dept. staff did not want to be 
deluged with extra work all at once in January.

2. This will all depend on your staffing (in ILL and cataloguing) and 
lending volume. We don't ask for "in process" to be rush cataloged for 
ILL. We have too much volume and not enough staff.  Our cataloguing 
staff are already too busy rush cataloguing material for our own 
students and faculty (our FTE is over 50,000) and there's a handy "in 
process" button right in the catalog record, so these requests are 
submitted online. We could make exceptions if a library can't find a 
book elsewhere, but that would only be if there was a special request.

Mary

Joanna Duy wrote:
>
> Hi-
>
> Question 1: I'm fairly new to Interlibrary Loan and the staff here 
> tell me that near Christmas, they stop putting return items in the 
> mail -- because of the heavy volume around this time of year, there's 
> concern that things will get lost.
>
> I've spoken to a couple of other Canadian ILL operations who said they 
> don't do this and it hasn't been a problem for them, and I'd be 
> curious to know if others (particularly Canadian libraries) hold back 
> their ILL mail over the Christmas season.
>
>  
>
> Question 2: Another thing we do here is, if we get a request on the 
> lending side for a new book that is "in process", we'll place a rush 
> hold on it and ask our cataloging folks to rush process it so we can 
> lend. Our Collections folks have asked if this is common ILL practice 
> and again, the two libraries I've spoken with don't do this, but I 
> wondered about others.
>
>  
>
> Thanks very much-
>
> Joanna Duy
>
>  
>
> --
> Joanna Duy
> Head, Periodicals and Media Services and Interlibrary Loan
> Concordia University Libraries
>
>

-- 

Mary Lehane

Manager, Resource Sharing Department

207 Scott Library, York University

4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

 

Phone: (416) 736-5808 Fax: (416)736-5920

Ariel: 130.63.180.22 E-mail: mlehane at yorku.ca <mailto:mlehane at yorku.ca>

 

http://www.library.yorku.ca/ccm/ResourceSharing/ServicesForYork/index.htm

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