[ILL-L] Requests for items your library already owns

[Pat Brosenne]

We vet every ILL request at our reference desk BEFORE passing it on to the
ILL department.  If we own it, we send a cancel request to the patron
telling them we own it.  We use the standard messages as well as custom
messages we have created.


Pat Brosenne
pbrosenne at alb.edu
610-921-7212  (V)
610-921-7509  (F)


-----Original Message-----
From: ill-l-bounces at webjunction.org [mailto:ill-l-bounces at webjunction.org]
On Behalf Of Melissa Jackson
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2007 8:02 AM
To: vincentiw at mail.montclair.edu; Interlibrary Loan Listserv
Subject: Re: [ILL-L] Requests for items your library already owns

I went through our statistics from 2003-2006, and it looks like just 
under 20% of our requests are for items we own.  Our ILL form asks the 
patron to make sure we don't own what they want in two separate places, 
and he/she must answer to finish filling out the request.  When we cover 
ILL in our bibliographic instruction sessions we stress checking our 
holdings before placing a request.  When I help students at the 
Reference desk I also stress this, and show them our easy it is to check 
holdings thanks to convienent hotlinks built into the form.

But nothing seems to work. As soon as I train one patron to check, that 
person graduates and is replaced by another person who never checks.  
Plus we have a small handful of faculty members who seem totally 
incapable of remembering to check, despite numerous polite reminders.  
If anyone has a solution to this problem I'd love to hear it.


Melissa Jackson
ILL Librarian


William Vincenti wrote:

> 20-25% of the requests our ILL Department receives are for items that 
> we already own and responding to the patrons submitting the requests 
> is taking up quite a bit of time that could be used more productively 
> elsewhere.  The last I read in the literature this was a fairly common 
> problem.  Have there been any discussions lately about solutions?
>
> On the technical side of things we're starting to explore filtering 
> the ILL form through our link resolver to use that as a way to make it 
> more clear to the patron whether we own it or not.
> -Bill
>

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