Abstract

While implementing a new ISO-ILL management system (Virtual Document eXchange - VDX), the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) took the opportunity to analyse all aspects of its interlibrary loan (ILL) operation in order to gain processing efficiencies and improve service to its user communities. Moving to a user-centered ILL operation without any requesting limits required liberalizing its policies and engaging automation to effectively manage the increased workload. With VDX as its automation centrepiece, other components automatically authenticate users, create new user accounts, build and route most requests without mediation, create brief bibliographic and item records for returnables received, and automatically send user-alerts predicated on the borrowing transaction record information. The majority of borrowing requests effortlessly route to supplying libraries whether originating from UCSB’s on-line databases, University of California’s union catalog, or from any of 8 SFX Citation Linker web forms.

In adopting an “Engineer to the Rule and Not the Exception” motto for evaluating its policies and utilizing automation, UCSB ILL has reduced its per transaction processing costs, including a reduction in staff FTE, and measurably improved its service to its user communities.