Tuesday, September 16, 2008

We have a winner ... again

It looks as though she is on a winning streak. Last Year Rosana Diaz-Zambrana of Modern Languages has won the first Annual Olin Library Interlibrary Borrowing Prize. Well she has done it again; more than doubling her number of interlibrary loan requests made in the 07-08 academic year from 50 to 103!

This is a great opportunity to announce that we have just implemented the ILLiad software at Rollins which is going to make a huge difference to interlibrary loan service, making it both easier to request and receive materials and more efficient for our staff and student workers to process those requests.

Click here to set up your account.
Our interlibrary loan service remains free to all Rollins students, faculty, and staff and there is no limit on the number of request you may submit. Here is how we hope it makes your life easier:
  1. You only have to enter your personal information once. Unless you change your address etc. you never have to do it again.
  2. If you find out about a book or journal article when searching one of the databases provided by the library and the book or the article is not available online or on campus, simply clicking on the Findit button will enable you to place an interlibrary loan request and you will not need to retype any of the information about the article or book. Just click the button at the bottom of the page and your done.
  3. Using your FoxID and password gives you access to your interlibrary loan account from on or off campus, anytime day or night. You can place requests, view what you have on order, check on the status of your request, cancel requests, and review all your old requests.
  4. When your materials arrive, if they were sent online (and most journal articles are) you will receive an e-mail with a link to the article that you can then view or print out. This link will be active to 30 days. If your materials arrive in print, you will receive an e-mail letting you know the book is ready for pick up at the Circulation Desk.
This is just the beginning. We are looking into more ways to speed up interlibrary loan service. Stay tuned.
Thanks to Bill Svitavsky, Melanie Osborn, Paul Gindlesperger, Jim Spitzer, and Katie Sanchez for all their hard work in making this happen. As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions for improving this and all other library services.


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