[ILL-L] GREEN ILL

[Campbell, Heather]

What can you do (or do you do) to make your ILL Dept more "green",
eco-friendly, less wasteful, etc?  
 
ILL at my library isn't considered a "core service".  I gather we're not
alone in this. I was at a conference and one of our speakers (who
represented OCLC UK) referred to ILL as a "Cinderella Service".  So,
recycling has been a way of life for some years now.  My staff would
find still usable items other departments were throwing out and they'd
end up in ILL.  Including that large talking standing cut-out of Count
Orloff from Children's- but I digress.   My staff had a field day when
we moved from the old building going through the deserted building
seeing what we could use in the new building.  We re-use the boxes that
come with heavy or outsized loaned books and the ones we are asked to
return items in.  We recycle in-house barcodes. We recycle boxes - the
still useable ones we get in the mail and cast-off boxes from Talking
Books and the branch of the IT office.  If the bubble mailers are still
usable, we recycle them.  The reverse side of our courier barcoded
address slips from us get recycled as JPL courier canvas bag address
slips and scrap paper in other departments.  With ILLiad, we go through
the address labels online before we print them off and only print what
we need.  Unused labels get moved to other sheets to make full sheets of
labels and they get re-used.  We have problems getting supplies and did
even before the budget crunch- so- we do what we can to stay afloat. 
 
 

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

 

________________________________

From: ill-l-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:ill-l-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Klump, Holly
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 1:04 PM
To: Interlibrary Loan Listserv
Subject: [ILL-L] GREEN ILL


I have been thinking more about this lately, and with Earth Day coming
up, thought it would be an appropriate time to share ideas.
 
What can you do (or do you do) to make your ILL Dept more "green",
eco-friendly, less wasteful, etc?  
 
I wish we used a lot less paper and I have some ideas on how to cut down
on that, but I wanted to sort of "test drive" ideas this summer when
there are not so many requests coming in.  Simply put, my idea is to
simply reduce the amount of printing that we do by relying on looking up
more information in Clio and First Search.  I still like the idea of
printing out requests but I think that we could cut down on paper by
about 1/3.  I do think this could be a challenge to implement.  We shall
see!  I'm more in the "look it up" generation and am comfortable relying
on the computer, but not everyone has that same comfort level, so I can
respect that.
 
Of course we recycle everything that we can.  
 
I am trying to find some different reuseable packaging supplies but so
far, no luck.  That is why after we use up our stash of envelopes (that
everyone dislikes!), I'm thinking about trying just to mail books in
boxes since we have so many of them on hand.  Plus you can use boxes
many more times than evelopes.  We'd still reuse envelopes that we get
from other libraries as we do now!
 
Another idea that I had was using the backs of papers to print out
requests for fetching and borrowing.  (Think: all those full sheets of
paper in the recycling bin that have one blank side.)  To do this,
however, I think we need a two drawer printer, since we share the
printer with other people.  Until then I can't implement my idea b/c it
would be ridiculous to switch paper in and out all day long, and hope no
one else prints while you are printing on scrap paper!
 
All that said, we are a very small college so I'm not sure how our ideas
translate to larger libraries.
 
I would love to hear all of your ideas.  I'm sure we can all come up
with some good ones!
 
Holly Klump
ILL Coordinator
 
Regina Library
Rivier College
603.897.8255
 
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