At Midwinter in Dallas, the Vendor Relations Committee members were joined by Katie Birch, Portfolio Director, Delivery Services at OCLC; Clare MacKeigan, COO of Relais International; and John Reese, COO of Backstage Library Works. One of the goals of the committee this year was to invite vendors to participate, and we were pleased to have them involved in the discussion. The group reviewed the activities over the past year and talked about the focus for this year. It was determined that we would choose one area to concentrate on over the next six months. E-delivery was chosen for the area of interest and we are going to be exploring different approaches to this topic. We will work with the chairs of the Hot Topics and ILL Discussion Groups to see if there might be time during one of their meetings to have a presentation on e-delivery options. Our thought was to ask individuals who are using a particular product to explain their usage and what they think are advantages/disadvantages of the product. We hope to include speakers who use OCLC’s Article Exchange, Odyssey, Ariel, Relais and Relais Express, and DLSG’s B-SCAN ILL. We also plan to have a written document to distribute that explains the various options. We decided to extend invitations to other vendors as we are focusing on a topic that is pertinent to their products and will issue invitations to e-delivery vendors to attend the annual meeting of this committee in Anaheim.
Becky Ringwelski, Chair
e-ring@umn.edu