Courier Services vs. USPS in ILL work

 I have to admit, I have mixed feelings about the use of contracted Courier Services in Interlibrary Loan work.  It's usually an annual membership and can be a potential money saver on postage expenses your institution would otherwise incur with USPS.  Combined with the Navigator (NRE) interface for ILL, it encourages in-state lending within Texas, Texans helping other Texans.  For the most part I have no major complaints with Trans-Amigos Express (TAE) that we utilize here.  Our service level gives us 5 days of delivery and pick-up and constitutes the bulk of our ILL business on a daily basis.  Where there have been issues have been with our partnership agreements with other library courier consortia like Kansas Library Express and the Missouri based MALA and MOBIUS consortia.  On the one hand, it's great to have access to their networks of library and we are happy to lend our materials to them in the heartland.  The problem crops up in the hand-off between them and TAE, which seems to cause sometimes intolerable delays to the point that mailing such items USPS would've been faster and less inconvenient....though with Postmaster DeJoy's apparent ongoing sabotage, who can say for sure.  The sooner that man is fired the better.  The governing board of USPS seems to finally slowly be acting in that direction and I'm eager to see DeJoy get the boot for a whole host of reasons, not just Library ILL work.

The pandemic for the most part has caused libraries to be more generous with each other in their loan terms, etc., and I'm heartened to see it.  I'm less than thrilled with lenders that don't take into account the courier-to-courier delays and refuse reasonable renewal requests to account for these delays that are out of either library's control.  We shouldn't punish each other or our patrons for something that was not our faults.   We can't directly fix the couriers, that's up to Amigos Library Services...but we can be more reasonable with each other, more generous, more accommodating.  Because that's what's best for the users.  Let's not break Ranganathan's 4th Law of Library Science if we can help it:

"Save the time of the reader".

Amen.

Renewing TLA and ALA memberships is bolstering public democratic institutions.

 In light of recent political events I felt strongly motivated to pony up and renew two long dormant professional memberships that I let expire because I didn't feel like they gave me much personal benefit.

In the current climate, it's about more than myself.  I renewed my membership both in the national American Library Association as well as my state-level Texas Library Association membership.  For reasons mainly personal, aesthetic and symbolic I also renewed my membership in the Progressive Librarians Guild that I was more active in when I was in library school in the early 2000s.  Yearly membership in PLG is cheap so tossing them a few bucks is no skin off my back.

No, where I really dug deeper is renewing those aforementioned ALA and TLA memberships and associated round-tables tailored to my current role in Inter-library Loan work.  I feel like it is important to bolster these civic institutions in a time of rising authoritarianism and outright white nationalist fascism on the American political right.  It's about more than myself and how these professional associations may or may not personally benefit my career aspirations.  I want them to remain strong advocates for intellectual freedom, the right to read, etc.  It's also because I lack imagination as to what else to do other than keep voting the way I do in every election (e.g. for Democratic Party candidates and against every Republican candidate).  But it was something I could do so I did it.  If you're still working in the library profession and have let your ALA and state-level library association membership lapse, maybe let the spirit of the season move you to generously revive your memberships and participation in these professional associations.  We need all hands on deck in the defense of small-d democracy and intellectual freedom and civil rights.

Why a Cataloging Background helps in ILL

 So while this post can be fairly accused of being entirely self-serving, I did want to weigh in on why I think a Cataloging background makes one a better Interlibrary Loan staffer.  The simplest reason being that your primary tool is OCLC/Worldcat which is the worldwide database used by libraries to report their holdings to all other libraries, with a heavy emphasis on the Anglo-American, English-speaking parts of the world.  I don't have experience with ILLiad or other ILL interfaces.  Our main interface in Texas is called NRE, or simply "Navigator".  And while it is possible to use Navigator to search OCLC/Worldcat indirectly, we've found in actual practice it pays to subscribe to both NRE *and* OCLC/WorldCat for maximum coverage.  There are different things each interface does better than the other.

But the basis of all records in NRE and OCLC/WorldCat is the bibliographic record.  A cataloger understands from experience how these are constructed, why they're constructed the way they are, etc.  We have an almost intuitive understanding of how search functions work, why books are cataloged the way they are, and also that duplicate records exist sometimes and it can be fruitful to pull from multiple sources.  There are ways to "tweak" ILL requests for maximum coverage if you understand these nuances and improve the chances of your patron actually getting the book that they want and getting it to them in a timely manner.

For academic journal requests we nearly always use OCLC/WorldCat as the preferred search interface.  It is easier to facilitate a request using Article Exchange on that platform.  Moreover, I usually try to select the digital ISSN whenever possible.  While it is technically possible to scan hard-copy as a PDF and send out that way, I prefer not to put that burden on potential lenders if I can help it.  I do plenty of that myself and know what a pain it can be.  If I can download and send an article completely digitally then I certainly want to do that in favor of manually creating a scanned PDF.

It is an experienced cataloger that knows about ISSN's and will search relentlessly to track them down.  I am damn good at this and that's why my ILL partner nearly always defers to me for these kinds of searches.  An ISSN is a more precise search than a clumsy title search, and avoids the difficulty of journal name changes, etc.  

It's hard to articulate in a comprehensive way why ex-catalogers are good at ILL, just that it shapes your approach to and understanding of bibliographic information in ways that non-catalogers don't have naturally.  The job conditions you to be aware of these finer points of bibliographic record construction and dissemination.  It makes a good fall-back position for anyone deciding to leave the realm of library cataloging and change directions.

Thank you for your donation {is what i'm obliged to say but...}

 Oh, lordy the useless things people donate to public libraries...like old encyclopedia sets.  Very VERY rarely is something donated which we can/will actually catalog and put on the shelf to circulate.  We have an acquisitions budget for actually useful material, thank goodness.

During the pandemic's worst phases we have to suspend donations entirely in the interest of protecting public health.

Most of the donations are passed on to our Friends of the Library organization, who store the donations in their own space in the basement and organize a fraction of these for (re)sale back to the public at periodic book sales which raise money for the library's general funds.  When I was young and foolish I avidly attended library book sales, both collegiate and public and collected many an interesting book.

It's fine if you want to donate to the public library and if you're doing it as a tax write off, hey, go for it.  But more often than not you'd be better off selling off stuff at Half-Price Books...at least you get a few bucks to either keep & save or spend on something new (to you) for a cheaper price.  And there are some books so useless you might as well dump them in paper recycling than burden the staff of Half-Price Books OR the local library.  Not every book needs to be archived, and Public Libraries are decidedly NOT archives.

It's above my pay grade to crunch the numbers to know if the donations we take in and house (and the space we allocate to store them) are "worth" the funds raised through book sales; and I suppose there's the intangible value of people feeling like they're helping a social institution (even when they may not actually be in dollars and cents).  Luckily the Friends members are volunteers, so it's not as if much staff time & pay go into managing the donation vault.  Weeding is always painful but a necessary part of growing and modernizing and keeping a library collection useful and relevant to its community.  The weeded materials get thrown in with the donated (but not usable) material, too, all for re-sale to raise money.  Circulation stats drive a lot of the decision-making in weeding.  No matter how prestigious a book may be nationally or internationally, if it just collects dust on your shelf it's doing nobody any good.  But as my old boss used to say, "a circ is a circ" whether it's in-system or Interlibrary Loaned.  If a book isn't popular in your home community but is often borrowed by neighboring systems, you should probably retain the book, because the circulation stats still justify keeping it.  I just wish people were better informed what kinds of book donations ARE actually maximally useful (extra copies of high demand recent best sellers, etc) and which are not.  Yes, we'll take your donation and yes, thank you, and we'll maintain a polite smile as we accept it, but inwardly we may be rolling our eyes just a bit.

Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt...

 

"Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen." 

--Heinrich Heine, German Romantic Poet.

(Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.)

 

I dunno, maybe read a book....

 Of course the contemporary right-winger's newest "Red Scare" McCarthyism, the focus of their Two Minutes Hate is all about the dreaded "CRT" (hushed tone: Critical Race Theory)....not that they have any understanding of what it actually is...

What it actually is is a legal theory now taught in many law schools.  If you actually care, factually, what it's all about, as a librarian I'm duty bound to point you to a reputable book on the subject:

My library doesn't own it, which doesn't surprise me as we're a public library and not an academic library or a law library.  Confronting zealots with facts won't convince THEM of course but that's not the point.  The point is to show them up for the ignoramuses they are to fence-sitting middle of the road folks who haven't made their minds up yet and can be persuaded.

If you want to know more about what CRT genuinely is, then you could do worse than obtain a copy of this book via Interlibrary Loan, just one of the many library services your local library is happy to provide you.

If you don't grant renwals, be generous with our loan periods

 There's a certain large public library system in my state that I have to deal with semi-regularly in the course of my ILL work.  Actually, though, I try to AVOID using them as often as possible.  While our borrowing requests are largely semi-automated and we don't normally construct lending strings manually like we used to in OCLC Worldshare, for items that don't have many native Texas lenders, I still do have to build a lending string there and import it over to NRE for processing.

I won't name this system, but it rhymes with Small-ass Public Library (but they're actually quite large, and radiate big D energy)...and they have the unfortunate perfect shit-storm of loan policies that collectively SUCK.  So IGAb about them thus...firstly, they're incredibly stingy with their loan periods...they're the shortest of all the major public library systems in Texas....that's bad enough...if they granted renewals it would be annoying but doable.  But here's the thing---THEY DON'T.  DFWuck?!  Thirdly, the courier between here and there seems to take a long time with their books such that they arrive with even less time in their already short loan periods remaining...and we have to beg, plead, arm-twist to get them to give us at least a few more weeks---especially during COVID partial shut-down and curbside-only service (since lifted)--so our patrons could get full use of their ILL'd material.

I just HATE having to deal with their books and hate it when they are the supplier....sometimes I wish they'd just turn us down and pass us on to a more reasonable library out of state.

We deal with some consortium partners in MALA that are nearly as stingy but this one's the worst.  The partnership of MALA-Amigos has been actually really good (but I chuckle that MAL(A)-Amigos means "bad friends" in Spanish).....the delays between here and Missouri can be extreme at times.  But all in all it's a worthwhile partnership.

ILL and the Anglophone World

 It really is quite remarkable how often my patrons will request titles that are held in Libraries in the UK and all throughout the British Commonwealth but NOT held by ANY libraries in the United States.  Like, NONE.  Sometimes it's because the American edition hasn't been published yet, or the patron only knows the British ISBN and I have to revise my search, but other times no, there is no American edition, it's a UK and British Commonwealth Book and nobody in the USA had opted to add it to their holdings!  Still boggles my mind a little.

Pro-Tip for requesting multi-volume Manga via Interlibrary Loan

 It is one of my joys as an Interlibrary Loan librarian to request obscure manga series for patrons.  My library system has an impressive manga collection, but as any librarian knows, we can't collect everything, and we depend on other libraries to pick up the slack and collect unique titles we don't own and they depend on us to do the same.  That's the essence of the rationale behind Interlibrary Loan generally.

 We Anime & Manga Otaku can be very very enthusiastic about our  hobby but I see a lot of patrons making rookie mistakes when it comes to requesting multi-volume sets of manga.  They want to request EVERYTHING, all at once, and believe me, as a fan who has pre-ordered multiple volumes of manga at a time via Barnes & Noble to qualify for the free shipping and because I believe in a series so strongly, I get the impulse.  But when it comes to Interlibrary Loan, you need to dial it back a notch.

The best practice for requesting multiple volumes of manga is to do it ONE VOLUME AT A TIME.

Request it, read it, enjoy it, return it, and request the next one.  I often will read a new manga that I've received via ILL in a single night and return it the very next day and fire off the next request for the next volume.

This is the best way to do it.  Why?  Well, because what happens when you request a multi-volume set is that the loan requests get placed in random, automated lender strings nearly simultaneously, but not every library at the top of the lender string is able to supply the requested volume for whatever reason, but they have a few days to respond before the system shifts to the next potential lender and so on.  So what will frequently happen is Volume 5 will be supplied and shipped immediately, while Volume 1 and 3 could sit in the lender string for quite some time.  Then volume 2 ships and arrives at the same time as volume 4 supplied the next day from a geographically closer library.  If you've been wanting to avoid spoilers and read the volumes in sequence and just been siting on Vols. 5,4, and 2 while waiting on Vols. 1 & 3 to arrive, you're slowly burning through the loan periods such that by the time volume 1 arrives, you have to binge like crazy to read up through volume 5....you may run out of time and have to return volume 5 unread and request it again.  You create needless stress & headaches for yourself because of a lack of understanding how the system works behind the curtain.  Not your fault, but I'm here as an ILL librarian to let you in on that "secret".

If you can find the ISBN of an Omnibus edition that's also a really good way to get the most bang for your ILL buck.  Be sure to specify in the "note" field of your request that you specifically want the Omnibus edition.  Not all manga get issued in this format, but a lot of the longer running "classic" series have been reissued in this more portable format.  If you can get a 3-in-1 Omnibus, that's only 1 active request in your "active" queue instead of 3.  Our library limits the number of "active" requests to 10 at a time, and many other libraries have similar restrictions.

Other libraries handle manga differently, but I always make sure to attach our ILL bookstrap to the front of the book as it is read in the Japanese way, Right to Left, e.g. reversed from a Western comic book.  I do not provide an ILL bookstrap on manga we loan out from our own collection.  Other libraries do and I appreciate it, but I always overlay our "native" bookstrap on top of theirs, with our locally assigned temporary barcodes, etc.

Also, and this is for other ILL librarians, it's good practice to include in the original request, on the title line, the actual book or volume number in brackets, like {v.1} or {bk.2}, even though you should still fill this out (again) in the appropriate field on the request form, too.  Our ILS prints automated bookstraps and these little tweaks help.  If I forget or the title is too long, I will hand write "v.1" or "bk.2" on the strap next to the title for clarification.

These are just a few thoughts and tips I have regarding requesting Manga via Interlibrary Loan.

I hope you found them useful, for patron & fellow librarians alike.