ILL requests have a tremendous impact on functions outside of ILL and can be used to improve holdings information. Due to several years of faculty librarian vacancies and increased responsibilities for staff, inaccuracies in our online catalog and OCLC holdings proliferated. At the University of Memphis Libraries, ILL identifies far more inaccuracies than library users or personnel; many of these issues are driven by lending requests from users outside of our institution. These issues are resolved through distribution to departments throughout the library by our ILL team. This cross-departmental collaboration has resulted in stronger inter-departmental communication, increased accuracy with holdings, and better discovery, access, and interlibrary lending.  

University Libraries staff from Information Systems, Cataloging and Metadata, Electronic Resources, and Interlibrary Loan will share how interlibrary lending has initiated short and long-term projects that improve the experiences of our libraries users. Anticipated learning outcomes include possible workflows created to effectively communicate holdings and discovery errors, leveraging OCLC services to address large-scale holdings issues, and developing maintenance strategies to sustain integrated library system accuracy.

Speakers

Sofiya Dahman
Interlibrary Loan and Resource Delivery Libraria
University of Memphis

Tiffany Day
Metadata and Catalog Librarian
University of Memphis

Brighid Gonzales
Systems Librarian
University of Memphis

Caitlin Harrington
Head of Information Access Services
University of Memphis