[ILL-L] Managing ILL duties

[Jenny Baker]

I am in "charge" of interlibrary loan for my library (& I wear many
other hats as well) but the other staff members check for possible
lending items and have the students pull them for me.  (I do all of the
lending processing & shipping.)  The other staff also go through our
review file and submit the "easy" requests (in state, free etc).  

 

One way to perhaps lessen your load is to do patron initiated ILL and
set up custom holdings so that some of your requests could go out on
their own without clerk intervention.  We do this and it has saved a ton
of time.  I have my custom holdings set up and my paths are very
restrictive so nothing goes out on its own that we don't want to go out.
Anything that doesn't fit the profile goes into my review file and then
all I have to do is apply lenders.  

 

I won't say that it doesn't take time to get custom holdings set up so
the middle of a semester is probably not the time to do it.  However, I
think that if you are interested in going this route some time this
summer and life will become a lot easier.

 

I can answer more questions about this if anyone has them.  I'm no
expert, by any means, but I found that taking the time to set this up
properly has saved our very small staff a lot of time.

 

Happy Friday!
Jenny

 

Jenny Baker

Reference Librarian

Marvin M. Schwan Library

Wisconsin Lutheran College

e-mail:  Jenny.Baker at wlc.edu

Phone:  414-443-8822

 

From: ill-l-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:ill-l-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of D. Phillips
Sent: Friday, January 18, 2008 2:25 AM
To: ill-l at webjunction.org
Subject: [ILL-L] Managing ILL duties

 

Hi,

I'm hoping someone will be able to answer my question. I am the sole
interlibrary loan clerk at my library. Until recently, this had not been
a problem. We used to charge our patrons a fee to place a request.
Because of this, not many patrons made requests. Last December our
director decided to change the our policy and make EVERY aspect of
interlibrary loan FREE. Well, needless to say, now that everything is
free, ILL request have increased beyond my ability to handle them alone.
So now I'm going to have another staff member help me with this. What I
need to know is how do other libraries divide the responsibilities of
interlibrary loan between multiple staff? I have the impression that in
some libraries certain staff does borrowing only while other staff does
lending only. Being so use to doing them both I'm not quite sure of how
to separate the different duties of the job or even if I should.  

Your help is very appreciated.

D.P. 

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