[ILL-L] fun ILL blog entry

[Campbell, Heather]

With some customers, ILL is habit-forming and there's a lot of
compulsive ILL requesting out there.  WorldCat is like a candy shop.
Our customers will request more than they can possibly handle at a time.
In the pre-ILLiad past, there were no restrictions on  the number of
requests customers could request at one time and we had a lot of books
that went back unread or unpicked up and -luckily- free photocopies that
weren't picked up. We have limits on the number of requests a customer
can have at any one time. I know there are a lot of objections to limits
and I've gotten some scolding e-mails.  The use of our service has grown
while  our staffing levels have gone down.  Our borrowing request volume
went up 32% last fiscal year over the previous fiscal year and our fill
rate in Borrowing went up 54%.  We're still a net lender.


Heather Campbell
Special Services ~ Interlibrary Loan and Books By Mail
Jacksonville Public Library
Jacksonville, Florida 32202
ill at coj.net    904-630-2985 


-----Original Message-----
From: ill-l-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:ill-l-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Angela Mehaffey
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2007 9:59 AM
To: Interlibrary Loan Listserv
Subject: Re: [ILL-L] fun ILL blog entry

We have a special cancellation message just for them.   :-)

Angela Medders Mehaffey
ILL Administrative Supervisor
Ingram Library
University of West Georgia (gwc)

678-839-6354 (voice)
678-839-6511 (fax)



Melissa Jackson wrote:
> You've needed to cancel 80 for one patron????  Wow, and I thought 
> having to do 30 for one person was bad.  I think I'll have to stop 
> fussing about that given what your patrons do, Angela.  :)
>
> Melissa Jackson
> ILL Librarian
>
>   
> From: 	Angela Mehaffey <amehaffe at westga.edu>
> To:	Interlibrary Loan Listserv <ill-l at webjunction.org>
> Date: 	11/8/2007 9:25 AM
> Subject: 	Re: [ILL-L] fun ILL blog entry
>
> My favorites are the ones like you mention below, Arthur--the ones who

> request tons of items that we actually own.  At times, I have canceled

> up to 80-90 items a day for one patron.
>
> Angela Medders Mehaffey
> ILL Administrative Supervisor
> Ingram Library
> University of West Georgia (gwc)
>
> 678-839-6354 (voice)
> 678-839-6511 (fax)
>
>
>
> Robinson, Arthur wrote:
>   
>> I can't match Melissa Jackson or Pat Barbour.  We did have a
professor who requested 300 items, nearly all books, on ILL in her three
years here (actually she requested more than that; she used COPAC to
identify books to request, so a lot of the books she wanted weren't in
any US libraries).  My favorite ILL patron (I've mentioned him before)
once requested 126 items at a time, and another time 66 items at once
(though 32 of the 66 turned out to be in our library)--then he wouldn't
come to pick them up.
>>  
>> Last year was a slow one--the most any patron requested was 124.  But
he made up in quality.  Most of his requests were for books in German,
Latin, Greek (ancient and modern), French, Italian, Dutch, and who knows
what else.  Oh yes, there were also two or three in English.  At one
stage near the end of our fiscal year, he had single-handedly accounted
for five-sixths of our IFM expenditures to other libraries (then someone
else went on a dissertation-borrowing binge).
>>  
>> Arthur Robinson (GLG)
>>     
>
>
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>   
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