OCLC Resource Sharing Conference 2019

Background: The University of Maryland Health Sciences and Human Services Library serves the schools of Dentistry, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Social Work and the Graduate School. Within the HS/HSL, the Resource Sharing department, responsible for interlibrary loan (ILL), is staffed by 4 ½ FTE including a supervisor, specialist, and 2 ½ technicians. With the number of ILL requests fluctuating throughout the year, Resource Sharing staff has had time to enhance and learn new skills. 
Method: In 2011, the UMB Digital Archive became the responsibility of the Resource Sharing Department. Through multiple projects, staff developed new competencies including the ability to scan fragile and unique materials, project management skills for outreach initiatives, assessment expertise for judging the quality of digitized resources and quality control. The projects did not compromise ILL services. Projects include a collaborative effort with the Medical Heritage Library digitizing State Medical Society Journals from 1900-2000, the UMB CURE Scholars initiative, and lab notebook digitization.
Conclusion: The skills developed through the projects were underscored by continuous learning, good communication, and collaboration. Staff use these skills to continue contributing to outreach, curation, and digitization for the UMB Digital Archive. Resource Sharing responsibilities are now strategically allocated between ILL and archive activities.

Clemson University Library's off-site high-density storage facility was established in 2011 and the relationship between staff there and the resource sharing department has evolved over the past 8 years. Originally, off-site workflows and processes only provided for the pulling and transit of material back to Cooper Library and other branches for circulation to patrons. In 2015, it was decided that off-site storage staff should be trained to use ILLiad in order to provide document delivery scans of articles and book chapters via Odyssey (now the Electronic Delivery Utility) as well as use custom queues to pull items for ILL Lending. The volume of document delivery requests for items located in off-site storage has risen dramatically in the past three years and in November of 2018 library administration decided that management of the off-site high-density storage facility would move to the resource sharing team. Currently, we are planning on how best to cross-train to work in two facilities and are anticipating what the move of even more library materials in 2019 will mean about staffing levels, workloads, and workflows.

Dickinson has a work-share philosophy among 5 full-time and one part-time access services staff. Because staff are cross-trained into essential job functions in circulation, ILL and reserves, it’s critical to keep our workflows streamlined and any changes as simple as possible. This can be hard when implementing change, however. In this presentation, I’ll evaluate the initial impact on staff and on patrons of Dickinson’s decision to participate in RapidR, or Rapid Returnables. Using data on request volume and turnaround time in combination with description of how we integrated RapidR with ILLiad, modified our shipping procedures, retrained staff, and worked out unanticipated kinks, I’ll answer the ultimate question: was it worth it?