[ILL-L] Cataloging upon ordering

Wed Apr 30 12:46:34 EDT 2008

I think what Arthur is referring to (below) when he talked about it taking so long to get a published (and in process) book from another library.  I know that books that have been ordered by our library pop up in WorldCat as part of our holdings- even though the book will not appearon our doorstep until sometime in the future.  It's that wonderful "Harry Potter effect" where some of us will get ILL requests for a book that will be published in the future.  I'm not sure if it's still true, but publishers will favor the outlets (such as Amazon and bookstores) that give them lots of repeat business over -say- libraries.  When I was involved in Collection Development and reference/reader's advisory, we'd often run into instances where a book was out of stock according to our jobber or cancelled because our jobbers couldn't get it.  Our patrons found that hard to accept because they saw the book on sale at their local Sam's Club. So, I can see where it might take a while to get a book through ILL though the time-lag Arthur mentions is pretty impressive.

In the pre-Amazon days -back in during the dawn of civilization as we know it- when I first began work at JPL and they gave me ILL to do along with my reference, indexing, and book selection duties,  I got multiple requests for a book called "Thy Neighbor's Wife"  Less than a handful provided an author's name.  Most had no author's name. Some gave me a badly misspelled version of the author's name.  We didn't have access to Forthcoming Books at the time and Books In Print was no help. When I dodged the saber-toothed tigers and mastadons to make my way to my once-a-week audience with the OCLC database up in Cataloging, I also came up dry.  At that time, we just used the database as a union list to locate libraries that owned the book and used ALA forms to request the books. I had a lot of unhappy customers because I'd ordered the wrong  "Thy Neighbor's Wife" for them. There were a lot of books by that title to choose from. It turned out that the author spent an unconscionable amount of time publicizing the book before the book finally was published and skyrocketed up the bestseller's lists.  When I came back to ILL after eons on the reference desk, there were all these databases  to help us find what the patrons really wanted.

To speak to the original question, we don't lend to people directly since Interlibrary Loan is -by definition- between libraries and we really want some guarantee that we'll get our books back or receive compensation (though we favor the former).

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 Robinson, Arthur 
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 10:53 AM
To: Interlibrary Loan Listserv
Subject: RE: [ILL-L] requests from England

We don't do ILL overseas (except for copies), and I can believe that a difficult ILL or heavy book shipped by air mail might cost a library in the UK £35 (anything that's unavailable in the UK is probably difficult to get), but I don't see why it would take a year.  I often purchase books for myself from the UK and have them shipped by surface mail (the cheapest and slowest rate), and they normally take between 2 weeks and 2 months to get here.  

Of course, a REALLY difficult ILL can take a year for reasons that have nothing to do with shipping.  It took me 9 months to get a book from another US library for one patron (because the book didn't show up in WorldCat for a long time even though it was available from Amazon), and on another occasion it took me 11 months (WorldCat indicated only one US library owned the book, and their online catalog said it was "In process"; apparently it took them nearly a year to process the book, or maybe "In process" meant "On order").  But we now have a new record.  It took me 27 months to get a book for another patron.  (I'd better not go into that story.  Anyone who's curious can e-mail me offlist.)

In any case, I wouldn't lend to a patron directly.  I've had a couple of cases of patrons wanting to deal with me directly rather than ordering through their local libraries; it turned out their libraries had suspended their ILL privileges.  (Okay, I'm paranoid.  Ten years of ILL will do that to you.)

Arthur Robinson (GLG, arobinson at lagrange.edu)

________________________________

From: ill-l-bounces at webjunction.org on behalf of Carol A. Vaeth
Sent: Tue 4/29/2008 9:47 AM
To: Interlibrary Loan Listserv
Subject: [ILL-L] requests from England

Hello all,
        I was wondering if anyone has experience with lending to Public Libraries in England.  A gentleman from the UK has written asking about borrowing (directly) one of our circulating theses.  After exchanging a few emails, he said that he is not associated with a university at this time, that he has heard that it can cost their library "£35 sterling (over 50 bucks) to request one American item," and "ILL request(s)for American items take up to a year to get here through the public library system."

        I have been working very hard to remove barriers for both our patrons and those borrowing from us.  But is it going too far to lend directly to an international 'private' patron?? 

        On a more important note, does anyone know why the UK has difficulty with international borrowing and is anything being done to address the issue??

Carol A. Vaeth
ILL Coordinator - BAL       It doesn't get better
Langsdale Library                  or worse;
University of Baltimore     it just gets different.
1420 Maryland Ave
Baltimore MD 21201-5706
cvaeth at ubalt.edu
(410) 837-4283
fax (410) 837-4330
ariel 198.202.3.140
-----Original Message-----

_______________________________________________
ILL-L mailing list
ILL-L at webjunction.org
http://lists.webjunction.org/mailman/listinfo/ill-l

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.webjunction.org/wjlists/ill-l/attachments/20080430/4dfe7c63/attachment.htm