SarahGlassmeyer(dot)com in perpetual beta

In January of 2009, my library had a bit of a reshuffle in the Public Services department due to a position loss.   I began handling the Interlibrary Loan responsibilities for the Law School community in addition to my reference duties. Now, I had never really done ILLs before, but fortunately the learning curve isn’t too steep. Still, there were  mistakes I made last Spring that I wanted to try and recitfy before the Fall ILL Law Journal rush.

PROBLEMS/ISSUES:

1. We don’t access to Ariel or ILLiad in the law library.  So all ILLs (requests and receipts) have to go through me.
2. As a result of the above, lots of paper is generated, which hurts my greenie heart, and is not the most efficient way for me to file requests, distribute items or provide status information to students about ILLs.
3. We have two law journals at UK and a not overly large collection which results in lots of ILL requests.
4. Two or more students often need the same resource.  This results in double requests and/or “missing” books, since we don’t formerly circulate the ILLs. I have one name that it’s requested for, but if more than one student needs it…well, there’ s problems.
5. I am a major freak about patron privacy and refuse to allow circ staff to tell people, “Well, X has that book.”
6. I am a minor freak about copyright, but that’s mainly because I don’t want to get into legal trouble.

We had our annual West/TWEN update today from our West rep, and it occurred to me that I could try using TWEN to solve some of these issues.  And, note, you could probably use LexisBlackboard or even an open source course management software like Moodle if you have issues with TWEN or don’t like to use vendor software in your classroom.   I just went with TWEN because (a) it’s easily available to me and (b) my school is so heavily TWEN centric that all the students are already on it.  So here’s my experiment for the fall….

1. I created a “class” on TWEN for law journal students. I plan on emailing the editors and request that the students join.
2. TWEN allows for “document pages.” I adapted these to “forms” (for the ILL request form), “requests and arrivals” (spreadsheets where students can see what materials have been requested and if they’ve arrived.  No patron information will be attached to this. I left the emailing function open on TWEN so that the students can hash material sharing out amongst themselves.),  and “Upload” for PDFs of materials that I recieve. Last year, I would just email them to the requesting party.  I think by uploading them to TWEN (which is a password protected site, so should be okay copyright wise), this will allow for greater access in case I get hit by a car that morning and can’t email it to them.
3. About the form…when I inherited this position, we had a printed request form made with MS publisher.  I thougth about making a completely online form, but decided that was over kill.  So instead, I changed some of the info on it and converted it to a PDF form.  Now it can live digitally AND I don’t have to try and decipher sloppy handwriting.  My iDrive is also slightly more secure than an unlocked filing cabinent, if you want to get extra freaky about privacy.   Print versions will still be available for those who don’t want to use the online form.
4. I adapted the “assignment dropbox” to be a place where students could upload the request form if for some reason they didn’t want to email it.  Not a necessary feature, but I thought I’d try it out and see what the students prefer.

This whole process took about an hour.  And I was participating in a radio call in show at the time.  So yeah, pretty easy peasy.   I’ll report back at the end of the semester if it worked.  Until then, here’s a slide show tour of it if, like me, you like to see how things look: