Here is the summary of our ILL Round Table discussion for November 2022.
General Topic: Training for interlibrary loan
Training that people would like to request:
- Bookstraps and shipping labels
- Participant record/contact information updates
- New Clover refresher webinar
- Clover searching best practices
- Understanding the different statuses in Clover, how items move to that status, and how those impact other libraries
- Problem solving in Clover – participants can send problems/examples ahead of time
- Lost books in the courier and shipping policies
- A more in-depth interlibrary loan training – multiple categories and topics, with in-depth views of each. April is working on planning out the content for this.
April will work on scheduling webinars for these topics as well as creating some additional video tutorials to add to the tutorials list. Training will most likely be all online so that more people can attend easily.
Discussion:
What is the best time to send follow-up emails to libraries with overdue titles? The books are due back to the borrowing library by the patron on the due date in Clover (per the ILL Code). One librarian received an email one day after the due date, which was a bit early for reaching out unless a patron was waiting for the title.
Clover updates:
In 2023 Auto-Graphics is going to do some big updates on the status screen interfaces to make them more useful and easy to navigate. A request that I received and passed along was the ability to batch update a shipped date or a due date (in the same way you can currently batch update a status). Auto-Graphics is hoping to incorporate that into the interface updates – but no timeline is available yet.
Courier Labels:
Some have left a “ghost” label text on the inside of the label holder. One library has had some luck using hand sanitizer, and another with a pencil eraser to get the ink off. If you have any bags with problems like this, please send them to VTLIB with a note and we will see what we can do to fix them.
A variety of strategies for storing courier labels was discussed.
ILL Round Table – Future Meetings
Will be scheduling the August meeting in person going forward.
All meetings for 2023 are below:
February 2, 2023, 10:00-12:00
May 11, 2023, 1:00-3:00
August 10, 2023, 10:00-12:00
In-person only – location TBA, most likely in Central Vermont.
November 11, 2023, 1:00-3:00