Tuesday, November 06, 2007

We have a winner!



Professor Rosana Diaz-Zambrana of Modern Languages has won the first Annual Olin Library Interlibrary Borrowing Prize. She is the member of the Rollins community who borrowed the most items via our interlibrary loan service during 2006-07, borrowing fifty items in all. Apart of the honor of this prize she also won a cup of coffee (thanks Barbara) from the Bookmark Cafe.


Rosana had lots of lovely things to say about the ILL service and Shawne Keevan who dealt with most of these requests. I can only agree, Shawne does a great job managing to get all kinds of materials from libraries large and small from around the world. Rosana's requests can be really challenging since she requests materials in Spanish, often published in Latin America and the Caribbean, and often out of print.

She was happy to hear about some of the improvements we are working to put in place in our service including software packages that:

  • Automatically authenticate so that users do not have to repeatedly type in their personal information and can also track their outstanding requests.
  • Automatically populate ILL request forms with the bibliographic data from our databases.
  • Significantly speed turnaround time.
  • Automatically deliver digital versions of articles to the user.

Shawne and the Digital Library Group are currently investigating what our options are and, if things work out well, we will implement many of these changes in the summer of 2008.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations on your first Annual Olin Library Interlibrary Borrowing Prize! Miss Winchell would be so proud!!

Jonathan Miller said...

Ah Elizabeth, you are going to have to tell people (including, unfortunately, many librarians) who Constance Winchell was!

We instituted this prize to encourage active researchers -- both faculty and students -- on campus. Sometimes ILL can be seen as a failure by the library (why do we not own the book or journal locally?) Or an imposition by the researcher ("I don't want to be too much bother.") This is just our small way of encouraging people to make use of a service we are delighted to provide.

susie said...

I remember a long time ago when my husband got a call from the Olin Library Director admonishing him for going over his 'quota' in ILL requests. Thank goodness for the change in perspective...that I'm sure happened a long time ago.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Olin Library (especially Shawne)for helping me get EVERYTHING I needed! Watch out people, I will beat my own record next year :)
Viva ILL!!!!

Anonymous said...

I believe Juan deserves a coffee too! For his trips to get at least 40 of those 50 loans!