ILLiad 2011

I figured I'd start off with the picture since it was so pretty (cold, but pretty) on Friday. I went to the ILLiad Conference in Virginia Beach for the first time this year, and yes, as you can see, I drove. The college was gracious enough to pay for the registration and the room, but I couldn't find reasonable flights at times that actually let me attend all the sessions I wanted to go to.

Since I just wrote up a summary for my colleagues, I figured I would post it here, too.

Wednesday:

Drove all day. Traffic was great; Delaware is a boring drive. Car got about 39-40 mpg the whole trip. Gas is cheapest in New Jersey along 17 right now (about $3.25) and about $.20 cheaper than New York everywhere else.

Thursday:

I missed the ILLiad update session – had to hunt down a doctor in Va. Beach since I woke up with an eye infection Thursday morning – but I got back for the rest of them. Word is that 8.1 (the next major update) of ILLiad will take direct imports of PDF files (currently they have to be converted to TIFs), but they said that about 8.0, too, and it didn’t happen. If it does, it cuts out a processing step for all our article delivery.

The textbook ILL/reserve session was good – it sounds like several other places are doing more or less what we are and trying to make high-demand items available via reserves rather than processing repeated ILL requests for them.

The electronic delivery session highlighted that Ariel is still widely used, but the general consensus in the room was, given that its last update was in 2004, Infotrieve has more or less abandoned it, and it’s going to eventually die out due to incompatibilities with newer scanners and Windows upgrades.

The University at Arkansas/Little Rock’s presentation on assessment was interesting because they are trying to pull some of their ILL processing back out of student workers and into FT clerical positions to help with quality and turnaround time. The presenter laid out a variety of ways ILL units could be evaluated, and they decided to try to improve turnaround time as one of their main goals. (He moved very quickly and it was hard to take notes.) One of his interesting points was that negative feedback can be more useful than positive feedback, because it helps you know what you need to work on improving.

The Screenr session has a lot of possible applications for us – the woman who presented it said her library tech people were pushing it as an info lit tool (follow-up options to info lit sessions for reinforcement), but it also works great for computer-based task training.

The poster sessions: the two that really caught my eye were the one from U Buffalo (or Buff State? the handouts are in my folder) – they’re doing their ILL checkout in Aleph, partly so they could easily charge ILL overdue fines. They basically set up a collection for ILL and add circ bib records, using their local transaction number for the barcode. This is something I might like to try. The other was a college’s integrating their Eres and Doc Delivery units somewhat by having Doc Delivery do all the scanning for their Eres, since faculty provided copies were… less than perfect, and fixing them was eating up staff time. We don’t do much of any Eres directly right now, but if we started, using ILLiad to submit scanning requests via the Doc Delivery module in ILLiad could give us an easy implementation for that part of it.

Friday:

WorldCat Knowledge Base – OCLC is running with an idea similar to the one IDS had for automated article request processing. One of the things that participating in this might help with is that for open access and items owned, OCLC will more reliably kick the items back at you with a link to where you have your holdings for it. Apparently the process has also revealed additional electronic holdings at most of the place that have tried it out that just weren’t showing up in Serials Solutions, etc. Additionally, OCLC is working with more integration with ILLiad and other ILL/Circ processes, such as checking your OPAC to see if an item is checked out or doing some ILL/Circ integration.

The routing rules session had a few that I want to try using, plus someone brought up that they’ve been talking to Atlas about having a routing rules repository in the documentation for ILLiad, so that may turn up some useful changes if it gets implemented.

I skipped the closing session because it was almost 11:00 when I got out of my last session and the drive takes about 11 hours. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge/Tunnel is a gorgeous drive in daylight, and really boring in the dark. (The picture is Fisherman’s Island at the very southern tip of the Eastern Shore of Va.) Driving with eye ointment in one eye is interesting in the dark. Traffic was heavy on 17 in New Jersey, but otherwise not bad.

(I got home Friday at about 11 p.m.)