PDA fulfilling ILL (or the other way around) at the University of Huddersfield Chris Beevers Customer Services Librarian Interlend 2016

What I’m gonna tell you:  I’ll describe our pilot to use PDA to fulfill ILL Loan requests  Why we did it  How we are doing it  Initial results  And then I wont tell you what I’ve told you. Honest!

Background:  Concerns over the ILL budget  Traditional management information reports ineffective at informing collection development  More detailed analysis of the last two years worth of ILLs  Informed purchase of Archival E-journals Collections  Identified some book titles requested via ILLs that might usefully have been added to stock

ILL requests by format and school

Justification for the pilot  “15 (book) titles were requested more than once by customers from MHM and 9 of these had been renewed, 16 titles had been requested more than once by customers from HHS and 13 of these had been renewed.”  The cost of these multiple requests could be “of the same order of magnitude as the cost of purchasing the book outright”

My buy-in/agenda  Annette Moore’s presentation at Interlend 2015, “Instant fulfilment: Using Patron Driven Acquisitions to Satisfy Inter-library Loans at the University of Sussex”  Literally a Light Bulb moment  Need to improve our book supply times (as confirmed by the ILL Benchmarking Project)

Pilot Proposal  To provide an online form that would enable ILL customers who want to request a book to choose between a traditional ILL request (urgent) and a PDA request (non-urgent)  That the different types of request would be routed to either the ILL or Acquisitions Team as appropriate  Presented to LSM Meeting in August 2015 and accepted  Delay meant we missed the start of the session  Opted to run the pilot in the second and third terms

Technicalities of operating the pilot  A separate online form an over-complication  Instead we activated a redundant field in the Clio online request form and made it mandatory  Urgent (Equates to 10 days or less)  Non-urgent (Equates to longer than ten days)  (90% of loan requests are fulfilled within 10 days)

Pilot promotion  Low key pilot  ed all customers who had requested a book since the Academic Session  Fliers in all ILL books awaiting collection from November 2015 onwards  Online information explains the pros and cons

Information provided at login

Linked to information

The pros and cons  Urgent  = The request will be fulfilled as quickly as possible   = The standard ILL Service Charge will apply   = If the item is supplied via ILLs it will have a limited loan period  Less than urgent  = If the item is purchased for stock it will be permanently available  = The request will be free of charge   = It may take a little longer

Workflow (1)  Customer has to choose between Urgent and Non- urgent when submitting a request for a book  All requests submitted to the ILL Management System in the first instance  All requests auto-checked against Summon  All requests auto-checked against EBL

Workflow (2)  If the title is found on EBL it is switched on and added to our profile  The link is sent to the customer by from within the ILL system  The item is received from EBL as a supplier, due back today and returned today

Workflow (3)  If the request was Urgent and the title isn’t found on EBL it is auto-checked against the British Library Catalogue and processed as a traditional ILL  If the request was Non-urgent the request is forwarded to our Acquisitions team  Acquisitions check for e-book or print copy availability on Dawsons and Coutts (within 24 hours)  If the title is available within the £120 price limit it is ordered

Workflow (4)  If the title is available electronically Acquisitions send the customer the link and copy ILLs in  If a print copy is ordered, when it arrives Acquisitions reserve it for the customer, them that it is awaiting collection and copy ILLs in  If the title is available but above the £120 limit the appropriate Subject Librarian is asked to decide  If the title cannot be traced for purchase the request is bounced back to the ILL team who process it as a traditional ILL

How requests were submitted

How requests were fulfilled

Supply times  EBL: Quickest = 0 Slowest = 30 Average = 1.34 days  Non-EBL e-books: Quickest = 0 Slowest = 30 Average = 6.5  Print purchases: Quickest = 3 Slowest = 90 Average = 36  “book supply times from Dawson are: 80% of orders are received by the library within 3 weeks or 15 working days, however, if the books are delivered in a busy period processing can take 4 weeks”

Customer Feedback  Hardly a ‘dicky bird’  A few “can you tell me what has happened to my request” type enquiries  5 requests for a duplicate ILL request after an e- copy already supplied  No actual complaints. So far!  Customer comments questionnaire about to be circulated

Benefits so far  E-Book supply within 0 days ! Wow!  It directly connects customer need to collection development (G, B or I)  New skills for the ILL Team  Cross team working

What next?  Complete the pilot at the end of the Financial Year  Undertake customer satisfaction survey  Analyse EBL behaviour and related costs  Compile other costs  Assess the usefulness of the titles for stock  Evaluate the success of the new workflow and decide whether to adopt permanently

And here’s what I’ve just told you  Only joking!  Thanks for listening  Acknowledgements:  CLS Internal report: Harnessing Patron Driven Acquisition and ILLs in tandem to satisfy customer need and add desirable items to Library Stock, University of Huddersfield  Lightbulb graphic by Savio Ferreira (Own work) [Public Domain] via Wikimedia commons  Annette Moore’s presentation at Interlend 2015, “Instant fulfilment: Using Patron Driven Acquisitions to Satisfy Inter- library Loans at the University of Sussex”