|
OCLC ILL Basics and Tricks |
Course Home Page
Lesson #1, Introduction to OCLC, Constant Data, Searching WorldCat
Lesson #2, Looking at Holdings, Sending Request
Lesson #3, Basic ILL Cycle, the Request Manager and Batch Processing
Lesson #4, ILL Guidelines, Union List Information and ILL Policies
Lesson #4, ILL Guidelines, Union List Information and ILL Policies
The Course so far ...
At this point we have looked at the overall ILL cycle and then we made a right good mess of the requests in our Request Manager play accounts. We also looked at Batch Updating, Printing and the miracle of bar codes. That was an awful lot to digest at one sitting, but I think it hangs together logically. For our fourth and final lesson in the ILL Basics sequence we'll talk about how to be a good ILL neighbor by following the guidelines, using ownership information as well as their ILL Policies to make good decisions to choose lenders.
You can contact me by using the Discussion function within the Desire2Learn courseware, or at times it might be better to email me directly at:
Course hint. If you have a large enough computer screen you might want to open up 2 or more browser windows. One to display the course itself in it's Desire2Learn environment. The other window would be to the OCLC WorldCat Resource Sharing system so you can follow along with the lesson. Log in instructions are given below with special play authorizations for you to use listed in the Assignment area at the bottom of this page.
These are "da rules" for ILL that have at times been written down and at other times you had to be a member of a special private club with a secret handshake in order to learn them. Luckily we're at a point in history where the guidelines are written down so you can read them and point them out to others. I've listed some of the more important specific guidelines below and attempted to explain how they apply to OCLC ILL work and how they work for the majority of Wisconsin libraries active in the ILL world.
The primary and first resource for ILL Guidelines is the:
Interlibrary Loan Code for the United States
Prepared by the Interlibrary Loan Committee, Reference and User Services Association, 1994, revised 2001. Approved by the RUSA Board of Directors January 2001. Here's the link:
http://www.ala.org/ala/rusa/rusaprotools/referenceguide/interlibrary.htm#forms
And while you're at the RUSA web site you might also want to check out:
Issues in Access to Information: A Bibliography:
http://www.ala.org/ala/rusa/rusaprotools/issuesinaccess/issuesaccess.htm
There are some very good resources on current issues in ILL there.
Now it's time to look at and break down for daily use some of the specific issues. It's important to note at this point that the majority of the Guidelines are based on extremely practical considerations. The primary point being to get materials into the patrons hands in as timely a fashion as is possible, while also saving the time of all the libraries involved in the ILL process.
Borrowers must know Lenders policies
Policies are listed in the ILL Policies Directory
Which we explore in more depth below and further in ILL Tricks. The point is that lenders policies are readily viewable and borrowers should check before sending requests to them.
Lenders must update
If borrowers are expected check policies before sending requests, then lenders are expected to actually keep their policies up to date and usable.
Always obey Lenders "enter me twice"
A few lenders choose to be listed in a string twice, often because they usually have multiple locations to check for an item. This can happen with very large academic research libraries. If a lender says no quickly the request moves automatically to the next lender, the OCLC system does not make them say no twice. The reason you should obey their twice listing is if you do not list these few libraries twice in your lender string they will often say no immediately without working on the request. Unfortunately the Enter Me Twice club has become a sort of secret society since OCLC does not officially support this activity. Most Enter Me Twice libraries are good about stating their status in their ILL Policies listing. OCLC views ILL as an either you can fill it or you can't question so this club gets smaller every year. Here's a link to a web site that tracks the Enter Me Twice libraries. You might want to bookmark it on your ILL workstation:
Allow shipping time in due date calculations
By and large the rule of thumb is to try and give the actual patron 7 days minimum with an item. So calculate your due dates accordingly. If you are the borrower and receive an item with an impossibly short due date then simply act to give your patron that 7 days and return promptly.
Article field contains both author and title of article
The Author field in a request is automatically filled from the bibliographic record and you can not play with it. To express the author of an article for a photocopy request use the article field. The most common format used is:
Article: Smith, J: How it's done in five easy steps
Where Article: is the field tag. Smith, J: is the first author listed formatted as last name comma first name initial. Then colon and as much of the article title as will clearly identify it to the lender.
Verify, do it and note, if can't verify say so
Using an ILL system like OCLC makes verification easy the vast majority of the time. You find the appropriate bibliographic record in the 70+ million record WorldCat database and the verification information is already noted for you. However occasionally you won't find an obscure item in WorldCat. Now is when your Reference librarian skills take over. Try to find a record in the National Union Catalog (NUC), or Ulrich's, or other resources. If you do find it make sure you note where you found the information in the Verified: field. If you can't find the item make doubly sure you note where you already looked. Remember save the time of the other library.
Max Cost
Is how much you as the borrower are willing to pay to fill the request. If you leave the field blank that means you the borrower will pay all costs. Depending on the library and the item this could run into $100's. If you want a freebie say "free" in the field. It's amazing how many times lenders can hallucinate a "1" in front of a bunch of zeros. So using "free" is pretty clear. Also use total cost you are willing to pay, no formulas such as 25 cents per page up to 10 pages etc. Remember save the time of the other library. The final part is that you the borrower are responsible for knowing the lenders charges.
Lender Charging
If you are going to charge for filling requests, and you are not using IFM (use IFM, use IFM, use IFM, more on this in Tricks) make sure you include the ILL request number with your invoice. The very best approach is to use the ILL request as invoice. You can get an office supply stamp that says "Invoice" with a blank to write in the amount. Absolutely do not use formulas for charging, figure an average cost and use it. Remember to also save your own time.
Charging and Paying Asides
If you aren't using IFM then charging and paying is definitely a losing money proposition. If costs roughly $50+ for an institution like a library to cut a check. Think staff time. It also costs a lender roughly half that, so $25+, to issue an invoice. Although your institutions policy might not have a great deal of flexibility on accounting practices it's worth lining up your reasons when you talk to them about how to make both your lives easier. From a cost cutting perspective consider using the printed request copy as the invoice, do not follow up. If you want you can track non-payers and start saying no to them. Any more work than that costs you large amounts of staff time which even if your institution won't admit it is big huge amounts of money.
As noted just above, cutting checks for under $10 or $20 amounts is a gigantic loser. The solution is joining and creating reciprocal borrowing groups, or using IFM. The single largest reciprocal borrowing group is:
LVIS (yup pronounced Elvis)
Everything you ever wanted to know about LVIS is at that web site. If getting and giving free ILL is your idea of the best way to approach things then you need LVIS.
Copyright
Is only used in requests for photocopies. As the borrower you must indicate either CCL or CCG
CCL stands for Conforms to Copyright Law, use this for materials in the public domain such as government documents and any periodical requests for items more than 5 years old.
CCG stands for Conforms to Copyright Guidelines, use this for materials you are requesting under the Fair Use guidelines. This is where the famous Rule of 5 comes into play.
Rule of 5. In a nutshell the guidelines suggest that you limit your requests to no more than 5 articles per year per title over the most recent 5 years. If you were doing a theoretical total that would be a maximum of 25 articles per title. This applies only to actual filled requests. Many libraries make a large deal out of counting every single photocopy request as they go along. The Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), a tool of the periodical publishers, can help libraries track and pay for any requests over the Rule of 5.
Remember to also save your own time. In practical fact the Rule of 5 is a guideline designed to help you decide if your library should be subscribing to a specific journal or not. You do have the option of paying the CCC for overages of use but that's usually not a sensible collection development approach. One approach is keep track of your filled ILL photocopy requests over the course of each year. Once each year check for titles where you broke the Rule of 5, either subscribe to those titles or then pay the CCC for the overages.
Much more information. Here's a link to my favorite copyright expert, Carrie Russell's book, Complete Copyright: An Everyday Guide For Librarians:
http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Copyright-Everyday-Guide-Librarians/dp/0838935435
The only concern to the lender is if no code is listed, in which case they must refuse the request. However the lender is not to judge or deny a request by second guessing the borrowers compliance or lack thereof on any request. There are way too many exceptions for a lender to do that. Remember to also save your own time.
Duplicate fills
One of those oddities that arises usually in an irritating manner, but definitely not worth getting upset about. You send a request on your lender string. The first library fills but neglects to update the request to Shipped. The request automatically goes to the next lender who also fills the request. Therefore you end up with 2 copies of the item. What now:
Return the first lenders item if it's a returnable
Give the second lenders copy to your patron
The second lender gets all credit, including any payment, for filling the request
The first lender gets no credit, or payment, for filling as they neglected to update the system
Yeah yeah yeah, the first lender doesn't charge and the second one does, what now? Pay the second lender. You put them on your string and would've paid them had the first lender said No anyway. You might also want to consider not favoring the first lender much in the future.
Don't resend Unfilled
They already said No once. Use a different set of lenders the next go around.
Wrong Yes
As a lender you responded Yes, but then realized that was a mistake and you won't be able to fill the request. Maybe you simply clicked the wrong button a little too fast. It's OK, it happens. The only practical way to quickly fix this problem is to pick up the phone and call the borrowing library and admit your mistake. The sooner done the better, remember save the patrons time. They will have to Cancel the request and then create a New request, this time leaving you off the Lender String. It's your mistake, but it costs the borrower and their patron time and effort, so make sure to apologize.
Conditional
A Conditional response is designed to resolve problems with a request, not to create some kind of long term communication methodology. So as a lender you will respond Condition if:
The request has a bad citation
The Copyright is missing
There's incomplete addressing information
The borrower has asked for commonly non-circulating materials, but you could copy a section
There's an alternative edition of the asked for rare material available
The litmus test being that not only can you not fill the request, but neither can anyone else in the lender string. Conversely you should not use a Conditional response for :
A simple and straight forward No
Non-circulating materials at your library that might circulate from other libraries
Materials that are in-use
Save the time of the patron by quickly allowing libraries that could fill the item get the request immediately.
Special messages are well, special. In the OCLC WRS there are 4 such messages, 2 for the borrower and 2 for the lender. They are:
Borrower: Overdue, meaning not updated to Returned within 30 days of Due Date
Borrower: Received?, meaning not updated to Received 30 days after updated to Shipped
Lender: Not Received, meaning the system got a "No" response to the Received? status above
Lender: Complete?, meaning the request was updated to Returned but not Completed
The bottom line of all 4 of these status is they possibly indicate material that may be lost in transit. As such the very best way to handle this kind of situation is to pick up the phone and start working together. Make sure that both libraries fully check their shelves and records. It's amazing how easy it can be to shelve someone else books on your library shelves. If the option to have your shipping supplier do a trace is available, start that process. In all cases, the financial responsibility for the loss is on the Borrower. The material never would have left the building had not the Borrower asked for it. That said the Lender has a responsibility to be reasonable in their financial demands. For example let's say the item is expensive and out of print but the copy is a standard circulating version. If the borrower can locate a fair copy used, it would be a good idea for the lender to accept that copy in lieu of a large new copy replacement fee. Again contacting each other by phone promptly will greatly ease this social problem.
Picking the best records can on occasion be tricky. The OCLC WRS system itself helps. Here are a few more tips to help you get to the best bibliographic record for an ILL request.
National Library Cataloging
Always look for the cataloging library of record, the national library that created the original cataloging. This information will display at the bottom of a record in the Results List just to the right of the Accession No: For most US works the main library of record would be the Library of Congress (DLC). This example shows both Library of Congress and British Library examples.
The Libraries of Record are:
Library of Congress
National Agriculture Library
National Library of Medicine
National Library of Canada
British Library
Biblioteca Nationale (The National Library of France)
Formats
Make sure you look for the correct format and not choose a microform. This is particularly true when looking for serials. The icons on the left of a Results list help a lot
Blue single books for a book record and
3 red stacked red volumes for serials.
Rank by: Number of Libraries
Finally the system automatically displays search results ordered by number of libraries that own that item. This feature makes is quite easy to discover the single record which will be held by the most libraries and therefore likely to be the best record to use for an ILL request. Another common sense hint is that the number of holdings should match your perceived idea of the popularity of an item. For example if you located a record for Time magazine, but it was only owned by 5 libraries, that should be a major hint that you have not discovered the correct record.
When trying to choose the correct Serial record things can get confusing. The solution to your confusion can often be found by going to the full record of that "almost" matching record.
Other Titles
The section at the bottom contains extremely useful cataloging information. Including:
Other Titles:
Preceding Title:
Succeeding Title:
Title changes often cause confusion so seeing previous and later titles can be a big help. Note this area of the bibliographic record also shows possible call numbers, the National Library Cataloging and Subject Descriptor links. All handy information sources for solving problems.
Title Phrase Searching
Finding extremely popular one word title journals can also be a trial. Here's a simple approach that works. Use the specific Title Phrase search index key, and make sure you click the Serials Publications check box. The Title Phrase search requires words entered to be found left to right and the first word must be the first word. Even Time magazine works using this simple approach. Here's the search.
And now here's the results. The perfect match as the top result. Note the 6635 libraries worldwide. When you search for more obscure items you might need to expand the Search in database: Limit to: drop down to Libraries Worldwide.
Local Holdings
As we've played with in previous lessons you can now click on Libraries to discover which specific libraries own a serial title. The nice thing about the serial holdings display is that it also shows you a summary of that libraries dates and volumes owning.
You'll notice that some libraries "own" the title, but there's no local holdings information available. That's unfortunate but often there's a work around as libraries that have the link set up in their OPAC can be clicked into and you'll automatically get their OPAC display of holdings for that title. For example you could click on the name Marquette Univ. above to see their local holdings in their OPAC.
Seeing the serials displays by state or region or worldwide is the default. Here in Wisconsin our regional group includes:
Wisconsin (WI)
Iowa (IA)
Illinois (IL)
Michigan (MI)
Minnesota (MN)
Group Holdings
There's yet another way to slice and dice your display of owning libraries. That's by Group Holdings. These are groups formed by consortia of libraries that perform and collect local holdings into their groups to facilitate regional ILL work. Many of these groups are state wide, like the Wisconsin one which uses the code WCSU. Others however can be multi-state or in highly populated ares part of a state or a border line area. You can search Group Holdings from a specific bibliographic record or from a Results list display.
Because the Groups are primarily local and regional consortia finding out which Groups exist and what their codes are can be difficult. Luckily OCLC WRS has solved this by adding a Group Names & Codes link next to the Group Holdings search box. Click that link to pup up a new page showing all the various Groups and their codes. To search and display libraries by group type the appropriate code into the Group Holdings box and click the Select button.
Common Groups we use here in Wisconsin include:
WCSU, WISCONSIN UNION LIST OF SERIALS
SILO, SERIALS OF ILLINOIS LIBRARIES ONLINE
MULS, Minnesota North Dakota and South Dakota Union Listing
LVIS, LIBRARIES VERY INTERESTED IN SHARING (LVIS)
Using the Year of Article and Volume of Article search fields next to the Custom Holdings Path drop down requires that you use Custom Holdings which we will spend a great deal of time on in the Tricks course to follow.
The Policies Directory is where you place your lending information and where you go to discover that same information for all the other libraries you play with. While it might seem that you might check this database of information constantly in fact you soon learn which libraries you can use and which you can't. Most OCLC WRS libraries eventually set up a Custom Holdings system which saves your choices of libraries to use for lending into the system. We deal with Custom Holdings in the Tricks course.
For this lesson we'll concentrate on getting our basic info entered as well as how to find lenders info. Creating policies and it's advanced cousin Deflection will be covered in ILL Tricks.
When you log into the ILL Policies Directory the Basic Search is found on the first screen.
You can also enter the ILL Policies directory from the link in WRS, saving you having to log in with your autho yet another time.
The ILL Policies Basic Search allows you to look by OCLC code, or library name or to even look for Groups. Fill in the boxes and click the Search button.
Click on the Advanced Search tab to discover whole groupings of libraries by geography or consortium, type or material format. This tool is critical to creating Custom Holdings Groups which we will explore in full in Tricks. However it's a great resource to discover entire groups of potential lenders. Such as all the LVIS libraries in Wisconsin.
Click on the My Units link in the black top menu bar. This will take you to the section where you can enter the information about your library. The first section to complete is the Contact Information. Usually this is information about you the ILL contact person at your library. You can create, or edit a bunch of different contact people. It's all pretty straightforward once you start.
The next section to complete is entering information about your library. Start at the Information link under the Unit tab. Some of the information is already filled in by OCLC. Please note the fields with the Red QV Dot next to them. Information entered in those fields automatically appear in the QuickView that other libraries see when they search to discover your policies. So in many ways the information in those QuickView fields is the most important.
Here are the results from another library as displayed in a Quick View.
Much more Information on using the ILL Policies Directory is located at:
http://www.oclc.org/support/documentation/resourcesharing/libpolicies/getstart/
This finishes Lesson #4 and the Basics course. I hope you found it useful and I also hope you'll stay tuned for the Tricks course appearing in the very same instruction space. You can use the same links and log ons as the Basics course and you do not have to register again. In Tricks we'll build on what we've learned so far to maximize our use of the OCLC system to save us as much time as possible when doing routine ILL work and freeing us to devote more time to solving those sticky and complex problems. Here's that last Basics assignment.
We have 2 play accounts to use in the course. These accounts can be used in a way to experience the full WRS system but without interfering with regular ILL work being done by other libraries. In order to share our 2 accounts we'll divide usage alphabetically by last name:
If your last name falls between Andrew and Melanz, use
autho number: 100-017-631
password: tie
If your last name falls between Meulemans and Zlosel, use
autho number: 100-017-630
password: try
Search and create requests specifically for photocopies from serials. Remember to send your requests to the other play account, not to the ILL world at large <grin>. In the process try to find serials that are on the more obscure side so you can notice the difference between holdings libraries that have union list information and those that don't. You may need to expand your search to Libraries Worldwide to find owners. Some sample titles include:
Journal of African History
Journal of Thermal Biology
Third World Planning Review
Find some of your own too, including looking for extremely popular titles.
Click the link to ILL Policies. Look at search for interesting lenders. Look at your own too.
For the discussion part, after you have mucked around with odd serials and lenders policies:
list the obscure titles you found on your own, not my examples, and discuss the holdings you found
did this process and display formatting work for you, or do you find it odd and why?
which lenders policies did you look at?
did they have clear information and policies or were you left scratching your head over whether you should requests to them? why?
I'll be monitoring and participating too.