Getting to know all about you... ILLiad User Demographics – Stephanie Spires
Users Table
Every registered user has a record in the table; each record has a unique username, lots of fields for each user; status, department, street, email addresses, preferences, etc.
Getting to know them – means finding about them – their registration data and their use stats.
User table, transactions, and tracking table
Users are associated with Borrowing and Document Delivery transactions by username – each record has an associated username that links back to users table; each username has only one record.
Stephanie share the ILLiad diagram – useful, but it would be nice to update this and add the Worldcat Info table.
http://www.atlas-sys.com/documentation/illiad/content/ILLiadDatabaseDiagram.pdf
History and Tracking are similar, but history includes billing and supplier data.
Tracking is a short table, only TN#, DateTime, ChangedTo, ChangedBy
Transactions table is a big table; TransactionDate is last revision of the TransactionStatus.
From Tracking, you could see the changes in transaction for date/time stamps.
User Table provides all the demographic data that we are focusing on – looking at their use; Transactions table is important. Users and Transactions are matched by Username.
Using ILLiad 8 – search requests interface is on the ribbon.
Tip: Cleared column: B is cleared, BX is blocked.
PivotTable with exported Excel from ILLiad makes it easy to see the count of users by department or status. Who is using our services?
Search – custom search – custom request search
• Add a condition about Tracking.ChangedTo = Submitted by Customer
• Add a condition about Tracking.DateTime = Is between -select date range-
Custom searches can be saved. Idea – let’s share our cool custom searches by saving IRRP’s (saved – add them to the workflow toolkit) http://toolkit.idsproject.org/
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Libraries in the Cloud: Sharing Resources at Web Scale – Chip Nilges
Genie’s welcome - ILLiad10# is the twitter hash tag, feedback is important.
Genie’s story; Chip been at OCLC since 1994. Karen Oye was giving a presentation to OCLC about ILLiad. Chip asked if ILLiad was too good to be true “nothing is that good,” Genie admits – yes, ILLiad is that good.
User’s dilemma – confusing paths to information landscape – where is the library in this picture. Getting the library in the users’ workflow is important.
Cloud computing – pinnacle of hype-curve – computing platform – web-based applications with shared data and services.
KPMG report:
Infrastructure: Amazon web services
Platform: Google, Facebook
Applications: Sales force, Netsuite
? missed this slide, but the slides are available from ILLiad’s website.
Web scale value proposition – according to Amazon, cloud computing is a market shift away from % resources in infrastructure to initiative.
- Data is the Intel inside
- Shared platforms create network effects
- Syndication creates web reach
From What is Web 2.0 – Tim O’Reilly
Circulation / ILL: 4.9B
OPAC searches 105.6B
Annual transactions 5,265 transactions / second – pulling these transactions within a handful of commodity servers is possible.
Help libraries to deliver their full capacity to the user at the point of need on the Web, in a manner that’s consistent with user expectations shaped by global Web brands.
Chip has nice slides showing timeline of library services 70s, 80s, 90s, etc.
- Data – syndication – services
- Data: Make data work – available.
- Worldcat has 169.9+ million records, 1.5+ billion holdings.
- Unicode / languages supported
- 34 national libraries are loading records into worldcat.
- Collective collection – integrating data that describes content;
- Licensed digital content; databases, journal articles – Informatics; about 2M ebook records.
- Special collections; archives & manuscripts, institutional repositories, theses & dissertations
- Local library content being digitized; mass digitization projects, Google Books, Hathi Trust, Library digitized content. Worldcat synchronizes 12 million titles scanned from library collections. Archive Grid – database describing primary source materials and indexed in worldcat.org; OAIster moved into OCLC.
- Registry growth 2007-2009: 70K records to 130K records.
- Cataloging authors and researchers – OCLC Identities: http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/
- Over 9K registered affiliates through our self-service searchbox and open linking... Google, Yahoo, Bing, EasyBib, abebooks.com, Baidu, LibraryThing, etc.
- Example of finding a worldcat record from google – not high up in ranking because data does not contain as much review content as other sites <- interesting dilemma for library systems – note; we should be able to work with our users in their workflow to help reviews; i.e. promote using links, programs, etc.
- EasyBib www.easybib.com/ – helps students format references – they integrated Worldcat API.
Worldcat traffic: mobile 1%, direct access to worldcat.org 11%, worldcat local 34%, search engines 30%, etc.
- End user services; web scale home delivery, survey results; lots of favorable survey results showing users interested in this, and even willing to pay for the cost of shipping, many using credit cards.
- Get it from a library using Amazon makes sense.
- Linking librarians in answer services – identifying authoritative resources to use, finding appropriate materials, etc.
- If you can have one library card that could use at all participating libraries? About 65% say a global library card would be useful.
Rising sun – oops, I stand corrected, the Earth is spinning
On the way to a lovely breakfast, it was nice to see the sun rising. Breakfast time discussion is always a great time to find out what attendees are hoping for when conferencing. At this table, two ILL librarians are attending interested in learning how to better utilize ILLiad, one is especially interested in how to customize the workflow, and another is interested in using ODBC connections to query the ILLiad database to develop reports. Implementing odyssey using a copier was discussed.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Dinner with Dan Specht
Seafood and wine with Dan who struggled but successfully mastered eating pho with chop sticks; little more could do justice to a great dinner with many of the IDS Project, Dan Specht, Stephanie Spires, Christian Dupont (Atlas), Chuck (CCC), Jon (Nylink). Great discussions, ideas, funny conversations that don't belong in Cyril's blog; I will later include a photo of Dan for everyone's benefit.
Ed Rivenburgh (Director of SUNY Geneseo Milne Library & IDS Project) did a great job of introducing the IDS Project members, in particular, the Technology Advisory Group: http://idsproject.org/About/TAG.aspx - a fascinating group of very successful technologists from other libraries that work together to solve major challenges faced by IDS Project libraries, and sharing their solutions with other libraries. Sharing expertise in well defined projects that solve problems seems to work - albeit, it's a lot of work - no pun intended, but we are very impressed with this group (and that isn't the wine talking).
In the northwest, a similar kind of group is working with OCLC on the Navigator project. Seems like a strategy worth it's weight in gold. If these kind of inter-technology project teams work effectively, how do we support them? how do we connect the various groups? Developer networks get the programming talents talking, but team projects are distinct at crossing institutions and developing scalable successes. OK, time for sleep - thanks for dinner Dan.
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
- 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.
Special ILLiad meeting - an informal discussion group
Great discussion, about 25 people participated in an informal afternoon group meeting designed to discuss ILL’s several key issues about the future of resource sharing; pay-per-view articles, direct request for articles, and lending e-books.
What makes these issues key?
Cyril opened the discussion with asking attendees who buys articles directly from publisher websites – almost everyone raised their hands, none seemed happy with their workflow; it’s obvious that ILL workflow is changing rapidly as emergent sources mature; purchasing prices are at times better than borrowing and/or copyright royalty, color PDFs, etc.
Cyril shared that years ago he set up the Interlibrary Loan delicious website to include pay-per-view article suppliers, but in order to really integrate and streamline the workflow; a registry for pay-per-view websites is needed. As a group we discussed the criteria and workflow elements for integrating these sources, including the need for data such as price, delivery format, etc. An interesting issue came up that publisher idiosyncrasies exist – Wiley will subscribe you to the journal if you purchase a set number of articles online; other issues include challenges of registry and account management.
OCLC Direct Request for Articles
Great news from Katie Birch, OCLC – OCLC’s team is about to start beta testing their unmediated article request system that uses a knowledge base that works similar to IDS Project’s ALIAS http://www.oclc.org/news/releases/200929.htm; it will incorporate intelligent detect electronic holdings with ILL rights, and print holdings, and develop lender strings like direct request for loans; it will also allow libraries to load ERM data; ILL OK, ILL NO, and Silent (for local interpretation). Phase 1 testing is set for May, with Phase 2 testing in August; and this service will be offered at no additional cost (cool!). OCLC is attempting to work with SFX and Serials Solutions to make it easier to ingest journal article data for libraries to use this service. Hope everyone works well together, because we need all these projects to run smoothly to smooth out our workflow; and unmediated requesting of articles is GREAT!
Ebook lending
Perhaps one of the most uncertain ILL workflow is lending ebooks. Cyril led a discussion of the topic and shared screenshots of an evolving process developed to handle Springer ebooks that have ILL rights, as well as, workflow details used by Colorado Alliance, and Oregon State University. It was obvious that the attendees all feel challenged by ebook lending, and that no one had a best practice; similar to electronic journals – attendees stated the importance of securing ILL rights with ebooks – even though the process to lend them seems clunky, although not compared to paging, mailing and receiving returns. Attendees recommended talking with everyone; acquisitions and electronic resource librarians, publishers, etc. to work on this. The reason this is important, most packages, and Google Books subscription, do not allow ILL Rights – so more and more monographs are locked out from resource sharing. It seems obvious the problem is growing; more libraries are deflecting these, some books are ebook only, and the question is how to handle the workflow.
Question: Direct Request normalizes to print not the electronic book record? Because it is ISBN normalized to LC record, normalizing doesn’t always direct ILL requests to print record.
Consensus recommendation: educate ourselves with ILL rights on ebook packages.
Meeting open forum discussions:
- Serial cut impact on ILL
- Big packages are next to cut, this is problematic for ILL; we need to talk with vendors and make titles a la carte in packages.
- Assessment of increases and decreases in ILL – what is causing trends that libraries are seeing?
- Question: Should we continue to use the print record and not utilize the electronic holdings record in OCLC? Answer depends – check the cancellation reasons for requests placed on electronic holdings – are they being deflected by your partners? Highly likely, so depends on the data.
- Some libraries are adding text to make users place requests thoughtfully / judiciously: “ILL requests generally cost between $5 to $50 / item, and is paid for your research and educational purposes by your library.” Discussion revolved around the desire for education and transparency, versus the need to not deter researchers.
For more information about the special ILLiad meeting - just send cyril@geneseo.edu an email for the brief minutes and handouts.
To share your ideas for less clunky workflow for pay-per-view articles and lending ebooks - please add your comments - thanks.
ILL Mentor & Training - IDS Mentor meeting
Library to Library Mentoring discussion
Similar to WebEx www.webex.com/, the IDS Project mentors use GoToAssist: http://www.gotoassist.com to provide online support for libraries implementing or troubleshooting various ILL systems; ILLiad, ALIAS, GIST, etc. This may be leading to some service level dependency – what expectations are there during mentoring and following mentoring, expectations for mentee – graduating the process = ?
- Local customization of ILLiad settings
- Local web or word template customizations,
Besides IDS Project, there is the community ShareILL: http://www.shareill.org, Web Junction: http://resourcesharing.webjunction.org/ and RUSA STARS free workshops “ILL: Everything you always wanted to know”: http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rusa/sections/stars/publications/index.cfm
Tim Bowersox, coordinator of the IDS Project mentors is talking about developing a summer mentoring institute: meaningful and professional development training opportunity.
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