Aquarium – ILL among fishes and dragons

The pre-conference social sponsored by Copyright Clearance Center at the Aquarium was very fun. http://www.virginiaaquarium.com/Pages/default.aspx Took a trolley there and the ILLers had the run of the place, among the fishes and dragons: http://www.virginiaaquarium.com/animals-exhibits/pages/komodo-dragons.aspx

Great talking with everyone, colleagues from Texas, Buffalo, Notre Dame, Westminster, Ohio, and so many other locations. Some thoughts from discussions:

Some libraries are really struggling with staff shortages – this makes optimizing, streamlining, and automating so important, but they are faced with no time to make necessary changes. How can we all help each other out? Many features like Direct Request can be turned on quickly and save time to add others. Other ideas?

• People are using the workflow toolkit http://toolkit.idsproject.org/ and finding solutions and optimizing tips useful – COOL.
• Discussion of poor courier performance – what solution if the vendor is a sole supplier to an RFP? One radical idea is to get a statewide subscription to Google Books, and then use that to build competition to poor performing courier. Anyone have ideas to help a state that would like their courier performance improve?
• Interest expressed in having IDS Project grow outside the state, or establish regional IDS’ – Maryland IDS and Kudzu/ASERL groups are using some of the IDS tools – but what other relationships exist.

ILLers have a unique and tremendous opportunity to transform the discussion across libraries and within libraries; centered on user services, fulfilling information needs by employing strategies that leverage data, resources, and a powerful network of strong partners - each hour at conferences like this, we have precious moments to work out collaborative solutions to the challenges we face, to be excited about the great successes we are all achieving (11M filled requests 2009 ALA), to establish the relationships to build stronger ties in an amazing network, unlike any other.