As I mentioned in my post here, the IDS Project in New York is working on a better way to inform both patrons and ILL staff about what options are available for obtaining a desired item. The Rethinking Resource Sharing initiative has readily identified the fact that patron need and library expectations around those needs. Many discussions about transforming ILL service revolve around the need to give our patrons more choices and thinking a bit differently about our traditional services.  Some patrons might be willing to pony up a bit of cash for a quicker turn-around time or home delivery. Ready access to pricing information or items available in digital libraries like the Internet Archive can help those library staff members that want to establish purchase on demand workflows. The difficulty rests in getting all this information into one helpful place.

The Getting-It System Toolkit (GIST) seeks to pull together purchasing and borrowing information in one place for BOTH patrons and resource sharing staff.

GIST provides users and the library practical and thoughtful resolution of disparate information sources with key data, such as: uniqueness (for cooperative collection development strategies); free online sources (to reduce cost and/or catalog eBooks just-in-time); reviews and rankings (to add value to the request process); and purchasing options and prices (to give users and libraries options and streamline library work). GIST is flexible, so you can pick or choose which features to use or adapt. (–from the IDS Press Release)

GIST consists of a staff side that interacts with ILLiad and a patron request interface that allows users to view “Get-It” options from the library or from Amazon or Google as well as recommend the item for purchase. The staff side then allows you to route requests to purchasing or requesting queues. A lot of great thought and collaboration have been involved in this effort. The IDS project also wants to extend the reach of this tool by nurturing a community of GIST users who will make it better. Check out their presentations and blog.

GIST Home page:http://idsproject.org/Tools/GIST.aspx

Blog: http://gettingitsystemtoolkit.blogspot.com/

I just listened to the recording of “Redesigning Technical Services Workflow” a NISO/OCLC co-sponsored session at ALA Annual last month. One of the presenters, Arlene Klair (Head of the Adaptive Cataloging/Database Management at the University of Maryland Libraries), noted something I’d never thought of: that the cost of returning a book that had been received on approval (they returned very few such items) was much more than the credit the Libraries received.

They consequently negotiated with their vendor, Blackwell, for a better discount in exchange for which they do not return items. Their approval plan became a purchase plan, after tweaking their profile.

It made me curious… how many folks have compared the cost of returning to the credit received from your vendor?

If you’re interested in the recording, it can be accessed at OCLC’s “presentations” site. Arlene was joined by Rick Anderson of the University of Utah, Renee Register of OCLC, and NISO’s Todd Carpenter.

My colleague Heather sent me a link to a very interesting article on taxonomy in the New York Times. Carol Kaesuk Yoon adapts this essay from her book “Naming Nature: the Clash Between Instinct and Science,” highlighting the modern demise of taxonomy as scientists rely on DNA analysis and the technology of the 21st century to categorize organisms. Yoon cites a body of anthropological research indicating that the compulsion to name the world’s flora and fauna is a distinctly human activity across numerous cultures, seemingly necessary to our internal modeling of the world and our understanding of our place within it.

It is the latter which suffers as taxonomy dies out. Yoon posits that we loose our connection to the natural world when we fail to name the plants and animals around us. Medical research seems to confirm this; Yoon notes that individuals suffering damage to a certain region of the temporal lobe are unable to recognize, identify, or name organisms, they are “… completely at sea… not [knowing] how to live in the world” and “unable to tell the carrot from the cat.” They have no difficulty with inanimate objects, oddly enough.

So categorizing, classifying, defining things around us is not just a librarian thing, but a human one.

At the ILL Conference in Colorado this past spring, the subject of cooperation between academic and public libraries arose. It was an academic librarian who voiced these concerns  about the bias between library types to the praise of many public librarians. One of the values of conference of this kind is that it draws librarians from all types of libraries. I remember how fascinated I was at my first ILL conference when we went around the lunch table to introduce ourselves–what a diverse group of libraries we represented! Our work places us in a unique position in our institutions with knowledge of the “communities” outside our peer libraries and advocate for more lenient lending.

For those of us in the resource sharing world, this tension between library types may be more obvious than it would be to our colleagues in other library disciplines. It is not uncommon for academic libraries to have policies which limit or prohibit the loan of materials to public libraries. Public libraries are also known to limit lending of materials types to other libraries.

Those policies may need to change, however, in a world where institutions are starting to prioritize user needs. In an online environment where the world’s resources are readily discoverable, the needs of our users–whether they be acdemic, public or special library patrons–will be increasingly diverse. A single institution could not begin to meet these needs. It will take a strong community partnership to reach customer service goals of this magnitude, and that partnership will require policies that support sharing–no matter what the library type.

Have you considered how your library approaches the question of lending to those institutions that are “not like you?” Please share your stories.