Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
7-30-2015
Keywords
fsc2015
Abstract
Starting in Fall 2013, St. John Fisher College's Lavery Library began providing Interlibrary Loan services to doctoral students at its two recently established satellite campuses, the College of New Rochelle (CNR) and Onondaga Community College (OCC). Although students from both campuses received loans at their homes through UPS delivery, the campus' locations originally resulted in two different return procedures: patrons affiliated with CNR returned items through UPS, while an OCC staff member collected return items and drove them back to our library. Although this model worked well at the beginning, an increase in requests and differences in procedure resulted in confusion among patrons and staff relating to communication, extremely overdue materials, and renewal policies. After one academic year, our library reassessed our procedures and policies to improve internal workflows, better serve our patrons, and align with ILL best practices. Knowing that consistency and excellent communication with patrons is vital to a successful resource sharing program, we began by streamlining procedures for both campuses to utilize UPS return shipping. We also changed internal workflows, retooled overdue notices and policies, and became more proactive in educating distance patrons about the policies and benefits of using ILL. Since incorporating these changes and increasing succinct communication, distance students have been more responsive and mindful of our relationship with other resource sharing libraries, and feedback has been very positive. In the upcoming year, we are implementing the more cost-effective UPS CampusShip into our workflow, expanding ILL to include distance faculty, and continuing to look for ways to better serve the needs of our patrons.
Publication Information
Blackburn, Kourtney P. and Marrese, Alicia, "Ship it to Me!: Evaluating Interlibrary Loan Services for Distance Students" (2015). Lavery Library Faculty/Staff Publications. Paper 32.
https://fisherpub.sjf.edu/library_pub/32
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Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Comments
Presented at the IDS Project Conference in Watertown, NY on July 30, 2015.