Interlibrary Loan—Reference Collaboration: Filling Hard-to-Find Faculty Requests

Abstract

We have implemented a successful in-house outsourcing program between University of Oregon Library departments. Collaboration between interlibrary loan staff and subject specialists appropriates ILLiad e-mail routing capabilities to enable subject specialists to join the workflow in processing difficult ILL requests. The goals of the program are to fill more requests, fill requests more quickly, give subject specialists the opportunity to learn more about their faculty members’ research needs, and to create a stepping stone to a purchase-on-demand program.

KEYWORDS:

• interlibrary loan
• reference
• subject specialists
• ILLiad
• e-mail routing
• purchase on demand
• collaboration

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Paul A. Frantz, Head, Reference and Research Services, University of Oregon, John Russell, Social Sciences Librarian, University of Oregon, and Shirien Chappell, Head, Access Services, University of Oregon, for their support with this project.

Notes

1. Most notably, Kern and Weible's article, Reference as an Access Service (2006), explores the inclusion of reference librarians and graduate assistants in the ILL process to provide better access to resources. We created our project independently, used significantly different technical methods of implementation, and explore additional future opportunities possible due to our methods. Yet, encountering both projects together provides an opportunity for “repetition” of an experiment in different environments with differing university communities. As librarians move away from one-size-fits-all implementation of ideas from other libraries, having multiple testing grounds for similar projects provides an invaluable resource to assist in determining how such a project might work in one's own library environment.