[ILL-L] Question for my ILL Colleagues

[Lee-Anne Flandreau]

About our ILL department: 
We serve a public library district with 13 branches in Washington State. We
complete about 1000 borrowing requests each month. We use ILLiad. 

In answer to your question: 
Our ILL department purchases books for the library collection as one way to
fill ILL requests. All of our patron purchase requests and ILL requests come
first into ILLiad. ILL staff route current and past-year titles to our new
materials selectors, replacement titles to our replacement selectors, and
other requests to me to review for purchase based on fairly flexible
criteria (it's a recent title that selectors might have missed, we own other
titles by that author/in that series, we can't get the material any other
way, etc.). I have an annual budget like that of other selectors in our
organization. 

We were purchasing through an Amazon library account, but we have switched
to purchasing with IFM through Alibris (their symbol is ALBRS) in OCLC.
Buying from Alibris fits very well into the regular borrowing workflow, but
Alibris does charge rather high fees for processing each request. I have not
been able to convince my tech services colleagues to rush catalog our
purchases for us, so we circulate them as ILLs with very minimal processing
by us (property stamp and ILL "branch" sticker). We send the books to tech
services for cataloging and full processing as they are returned by patrons.

Lee-Anne Flandreau
Interlibrary Loan Services Manager
Fort Vancouver Regional Library District (YEP)
Vancouver, Washington
lflandreau at fvrl.org
360-699-8832
www.fvrl.org

-----Original Message-----
From: Douglas Hasty [mailto:Hastyd at fiu.edu] 
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2007 9:37 AM
To: ILL Listserv (USA)
Subject: [ILL-L] Question for my ILL Colleagues

ILL Colleagues:
Does your ILL service purchase books for ILL patrons? I know of many ILL 
units already doing this -- and we are very "goal minded" to convince 
our acquisitions and collection development colleagues here that this is 
a worthy service. We are planning to begin an ILL-for-purchase program 
soon, and I am polling my ILL colleagues on this question. If you have 
time only to answer, please provide institution and OCLC symbol 
indicating that you are or are not offering this service; if you have 
advice, I'd be delighted to hear it.
Many thanks! Douglas Hasty, FIU-Miami.

-- 
"May I aspire to be the type
of person my dog thinks I am."
- (unknown)
"Thought before action, if possible."
- Dick Francis, mystery writer
===============
Douglas Hasty, MLS
Head, Access Services Dept.
Green Library, GL-290
Florida International University
Miami, FL 33199
305-348-2459
Fax: 305-348-6055
LCP -- http://lcp.fiu.edu
http://www.fiu.edu/~hastyd
http://www.douglashasty.com