Interlending & Document Supply

ILL’s biggest customers are faculty and students in Biology, Chemistry, Heath and Nutrition Sciences, Psychology, and Speech.
Interlibrary Loan staff now generate a quarterly report for each subject specialist which shows what items in his or her area of expertise were requested from other libraries by Brooklyn College faculty and students. This report represents a valuable new selection tool.
Interlibrary Loan could do a much better job for its faculty and student clients if we could resolve two Brooklyn College firewall issues. 1) We have the technical capacity to send automatic emails to readers when their requests arrive, or when books borrowed for them are overdue, but the firewall blocks this capability. 2) ILL has software that allows other libraries to send us scans of articles requested by Brooklyn College faculty or students–this is much, much faster than putting a photocopy in the U.S. mail and also saves the cost of postage. However, this software is incapacitated by the College's firewall.
2004-05 brought major changes in the software ILL uses to do its work, as well as some new options. OCLC is the system we use to manage all ILL traffic, both borrowing and lending: this year we began the migration to its new Windows-based WorldCat Resource Sharing module, requiring a great deal of staff retraining.
The CLIO management software enables us to run a largely paperless ILL office, maintain efficiency in the face of increasing workloads, and manage highly complex statistical data. This year we had the opportunity to switch from CLIO to OCLC's ILLiad product (already implemented at Baruch and the Graduate Center). ILLiad offers the great advantage of interfacing with CUNY+: readers can instantly move citations for wanted titles from the online catalog into the interlibrary loan request. For the moment, we are staying with CLIO:

1) It is less expensive than ILLiad.

2) Competition from ILLiad has caused CLIO to release a new version that offers more features.

3) At the present, firewall problems at Brooklyn College prevent our using ILLiad.