The Committee hosted a panel discussion on consortial borrowing on Sunday, June 26th. Twenty-five attendees listened to speakers Randy Dykhuis (Midwest Collaborative for Library Services), Melissa Trevvett (Boston Library Consortium), and Peter Collins (BorrowDirect) discuss topics such as selecting a union catalog model vs. Z39.50 search, workflow efficiencies, communicating to patrons, and negotiating policies. Questions from attendees included loan period policies, how to choose a system, predicting and managing increased workload, and usability testing.
LLAMA SASS has approved a program for 2012 Annual; the focus will be something along the lines of “Sharing Our Collections: Future Trends.” A few program ideas were offered by people attending the panel: technology to create a single intelligent ILL request form that auto-routes the request to the appropriate service, getting library directors together to talk with each other about resource sharing/access policies, and managing membership in multiple consortial borrowing groups.
Kristina Eden, Outgoing Co-Chair
keden@umich.edu