WorldShare Interlibrary Loan Release Notes, April 2022

Administrative actions

These items require immediate action or decisions.

Follow-up actions

In an effort to keep your staff informed of new features and changes, you may also want to consider these items.

Use new off-system requesting functionality to track all ILL requests

With this initial release, you can now track requests between your library and a library or organization that does not use an OCLC resource sharing solution within WorldShare Interlibrary Loan. These off-system partners typically use email as their primary form of request communication and do not have access to a protocol-compliant ILL system. In the coming months, we will release additional functionality to off-system requesting. 

Benefits of off-system requesting include: 

• Track all your requesting activity within WorldShare Interlibrary Loan. 
• As a borrower, manage requesting, receiving, and returning materials from an off-system lender. 
• As a lender, manage reviewing, responding, sending, and processing returns from your collection to an off-system borrower. 
• Review off-system requests in your library's Borrower/Lender Resource Sharing Stats Report in OCLC Usage Statistics. 

Off-system request queues

Off-system requests appear in their own dedicated queues, one for borrowing and one for lending. Within each queue, all active off-system requests are displayed together regardless of their status, but the list of requests can be sorted by any of the column headings. The off-system queues look much like the regular borrowing and lending request queues, with some slight variations, including the Off-System Lender column in the off-system borrowing queue: 

As well as the Off-System Borrower column in the off-system lending queue: 

The off-system request display

Clicking on any of the entries in the off-system request queues will open an off-system request display. It follows a layout similar to standard ILL requests, but with a few differences:

• The top part of the initial accordion section shows information about type of request and the state of the current transaction. 
• All the significant dates are shown on the right and read top-to-bottom in lifecycle order.
• The bottom part of the first accordion displays all the bibliographic details.
• Below the bibliographic details, the standard set of accordions for lender, borrower, patron, and request history are displayed. These all look the same as they do for a standard ILL request.

Because the other partner institution in these requests is off-system and is only communicating outside of the system (mostly via email), you will need to manually update information for both sides in the request.

You will have to manually trigger all the status changes, including those that would normally be performed by the other party. For example, if you're the borrower, you'll need to mark the request as Shipped when the off-system lender sends you a "Shipped" email.

Because the flow of messages may be different from a traditional on-system ILL request, the off-system requests queue has a drop-down list of actions applicable to the current status of the request. This differs from the action buttons that exist in the regular lending and borrowing queues. 

Creating an off-system borrowing request

You will typically only need to borrow from off-system lenders when you have exhausted your in-system lender options. You can create off-system borrowing requests by taking an existing ILL request and changing its fulfillment type to "off-system request". 

Before the request is moved to the off-system request queue, you will be prompted to fill out off-system lender details such as the lender name and need-before date:

Responding to a request from an off-system borrower

In this initial release, you will need to manually create new off-system requests to represent incoming email/off-system lending requests. A Create Lending Request button is available in the Off-System Requests queue under Borrowing and Lending sub-queues.

You can copy and paste or type request details from the email into the new blank request form, as well as indicate who the borrower is and store the requesting system's Request ID in the Requester Reference ID field. Future releases will streamline this for less manual data input. 

Updating off-system request details

Once an off-system request has been entered into the system, it will appear in the appropriate off-system request queue and is searchable in the same way that traditional ILL requests are. 

Off-system requests will need to be edited for two main reasons:

1. You need to process and respond to an incoming email message from the request's off-system partner.
2. You need to instigate the next phase of the ILL transaction and send an email indicating the change to the request's off-system partner.

All fields in off-system requests are always editable. Certain fields are considered essential, and the system will warn you if these fields are accidentally removed or were never entered:

• Partner name
• Need-before date of the request
• Title of the item being requested

Processing updates received from an off-system partner related to an existing off-system request

When you receive updates from an off-system partner for an existing request, the Note option is an ideal place to keep track of these updates as Staff Notes. You can copy and paste or manually enter emails, dates, addresses, and other information into the notes field. The update from your off-system partner may also be reason to change the status of the request.

Sending emails to an off-system partner

When it is time to cancel, ship, receive, return, or check-in an off-system request, it is recommended that you make the necessary updates to the request details before changing the request status using the Change Status drop-down list. Note that changing the status automatically saves any changes that have been made.

Finally, you should use the Email button to send an appropriate email to the off-system partner. You can type in the email address to which to send this email. 

Doing things in this order ensures that the email contains all the correct details, including the correct request status.

Reviewing statistics of all off-system requests

You can now review off-system requests using OCLC Usage Statistics so that you can track your off-system requests along with all your other forms of ILL requests.

Off-system requests will appear in the Borrower/Lender Resource Sharing Stats Report in Usage Statistics. For the initial release, all off-system requests displayed in statistics and will show the off-system partner as having the "OFSYS" OCLC symbol. In future releases, we will be introducing the ability for you to maintain a table of your known off-system partners, where each partner can be assigned a unique symbol, and these unique partner symbols can be used instead of the generic "OFSYS" symbol. 

For more information, see Off-system borrowing and Off-system lending. 

Product Insights: Resource Sharing 

To help you become familiar with the enhancements and fixes included in this release, please attend the upcoming webinar Product Insights: Resource Sharing. 

OCLC Resource Sharing Conference (RSC22) web series 

OCLC invites you to register for upcoming presentations in the 2022 OCLC Resource Sharing Conference web series. This year’s series of free, virtual sessions features ILL 101 sessions, automation, controlled digital lending, and moving resource sharing forward during this challenging time. Recordings are available in the community center if you are unable to attend live.