ILLiad International Conference - I'm here, I'm here

It is great to be here in Virginia Beach.

Dan Specht reminded me a few times already, get that blog going, people want to know what is going on at the ILLiad International Conference: https://www.atlas-sys.com/conference/ConferenceSessions.aspx

This is not light duty, because I really can't be in every room watching everything, and although it will be my goal to listen to all the 125+ attendees, I doubt I can drink enough coffee to keep up with everything going on in Resource Sharing, ILLiad, and ILLiad libraries in 2 days; but here goes...

Just had lunch with Christian Dupont, Atlas – he was a great colleague I met while working at University of Virginia – he was the Director of Special Collections, and later joined Atlas to create Aeon: http://www.atlas-sys.com/products/aeon/ an exciting special collections circulation and request system that has a lot of similarities with ILLiad.

The lunch conversation was great – talking about the relationship between special collections and interlibrary loan – we talked about current efforts of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section: http://www.rbms.info/ they are starting the revision of the Guidelines for the Interlibrary Loan of Rare and Unique Materials: http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/standards/rareguidelines.cfm, also RLG efforts to share special collections: http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/sharing/default.htm

What is the future of special collection sharing? How can exhibits be shared, created as cooperative collections? How will the community of resource sharing and special collections and archives work together? Will we tether systems in ways that make library collections and exhibits more powerful and practical for users, for groups, for research? Great lunch talk over crispy scallops - thank you Christian.

Now attending the IDS Project mentor http://idsproject.org/About/Mentors.aspx meeting – discussion of mentoring visits with libraries – updating how libraries are mentored into optimizing ILLiad, using ALIAS, and other services, etc. The interesting part about mentor program is that a group of libraries are volunteering to drive/fly all over New York to help implement ILLiad with optimized settings, activate various customizations and services, and develop workflow toolkit entries. http://toolkit.idsproject.org/

Any other ILL Mentor programs out there? Please let us know.

Great discussion of experimenting with new models of training and service support – libraries working well together is in everyone’s interest. Cool effort.

Next is a special ILLiad project meeting – ad hoc discussion group that will talk about lending ebooks and how to incorporate pay-per-view articles in ILL workflow. So many great libraries and projects – kudos to all the ILLers for transforming library service.

More soon