Celebrating the future: the first Northwest Interlibrary Loan and Resource Sharing Conference

Citation

Jackson, M.E. (2003), "Celebrating the future: the first Northwest Interlibrary Loan and Resource Sharing Conference", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 31 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.2003.12231aac.002

Celebrating the future: the first Northwest Interlibrary Loan and Resource Sharing Conference

Celebrating the future: the first Northwest Interlibrary Loan and Resource Sharing ConferenceKeywords: Interlending, Document supply

A total of 215 librarians from eight states and provinces in the Pacific Northwest region gathered in Portland, Oregon on 19-20 September 2002 to participate in the first Northwest Interlibrary Loan and Resource Sharing Conference. The theme, "Celebrating the future", was woven through the day and a half of presentations and small group sessions. The local organizers were seeking a way to help facilitate ILL cooperation among librarians in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Alaska, and the Canadian province of British Columbia. They sought to bring speakers and content to their region and shared within the region, and to the many librarians who don't have the opportunity to travel outside their state or region to attend national conferences. In addition to these six states and regions, attendees came from California and Georgia.

The warm, late-summer days were equaled only by the conference facilities at the Portland Community College. Few conference centers can open a glass wall to permit participants to enjoy the unseasonably warm days between sessions. The conference was financially supported by British Library Document Supply Centre; Fretwell-Downing, Inc.; OCLC Western Service Center; Orbins, and Swets-Blackwell. A small vendor area featured Copico Northwest, Fretwell-Downing, and OCLC, Inc.

The program and presenters were planned to provide content to librarians from both large and small libraries, and from academic, public, medical, school, and special libraries. The pre-conference session on process improvement was given by Karen Liston, University of Washington, Seattle. This author was invited to give the keynote address on the Future of ILL/DD services: global possibilities, local responsibilities.

Kicking off Friday morning was a panel session on choosing an ILL management tool. The four panelists who described their local selection and use of ILL management software gave participants a good sense of the strengths and weaknesses of several products. Kay Vyhnanek, Washington State University; Theresa Kappus, Gonzaga University; Joanne Halgren, University of Oregon; and Frank Halgren, Western Washington University provided personal and honest perspectives on using locally developed software, Clio, Innovative Interface's ILL module, and OCLC ILLiad, respectively. Notable comments from the panelists include:

In the beginning there were no choices, there was paper!If you use it the way it was meant … and we don't.I don't know what comes after beta.

One of the innovations of the conference was a virtual, Web-based presentation by Stephen Badalamente, Columbia Basin College. Breakout sessions presented difficult choices to participants. They either attended a one-person ILL operation, or used numbers to tell an ILL story; they used free or low-cost tools for small libraries, or established a Web-based ILL presence offering detail and topics of interest to the variety of librarians at the conference. The topics of the breakout sessions were selected to address this range of libraries in the region. A total of 44 per cent of participants were from academic libraries, 33 per cent from public libraries, and 22 per cent from special and medical libraries.

The concluding all-conference forum provided an opportunity for librarians to discuss how small and large libraries could work together. Using a small number of participant-generated questions, small groups were challenged to identify strategies and ideas to facilitate cooperation between and among small and large libraries, and between and among libraries of different types. Desire for additional training, challenges about funding ILL services or paying lending fees, and inconsistent and variant lending policies were major themes.

It's unusual to report bathroom conversations, but the following conversation confirmed that my presentation on the first day was understood:

Attendee 1, coming out of the bathroom: I sure hope no one is tracking our turnaround time.Attendee 2, waiting to get in: I sure hope that they don't expect us to be paperless.

Executive summaries of the presentations, and a summary of ideas generated from the brainstorming session will be posted on the conference Web site: http://libweb.uoregon.edu/orbis/NWILL/ The conference organizers are to be complimented on a very successful conference and have indicated that they are planning the second conference.

Readers might be interested in the range of issues tackled at the conference (Ed):

1. 1.

   Pre-conference: users, data, and good "PI" work: uncovering the secrets of process improvement for interlibrary loan, presentation, bibliography Karen A. Liston, University of Washington Libraries.

2. 2.

   Keynote: Mary E. Jackson, Association of Research Libraries.

3. 3.

   Friday:

4. 4.
   • •

     Choosing an ILL management tool, Panel discussion – Frank Haulgren, Western Washington University; Kay Vyhnanek, Washington State University-Pullman; Theresa Kappus, Gonzaga University; Joanne V. Halgren, University of Oregon.

   • •

     Doing it all in the one person operation – Sam Sayre, OCLC Library Services Consultant.

   • •

     Telling your interlibrary loan story with numbers, paper presentation – Jeanne Goodrich, Library Management Consultant, Portland, Oregon.

   • •

     Free or low-cost tools for small libraries – panel discussion – Martha Parsons, Washington State University Energy Program Library; Susan Barnes presentation – handout, University of Washington Health Sciences Library Program Library; Stephen Badalamente, Columbia Basin College; Terry Reese, Oregon State University.

   • •

     Establishing a Web-based presence, Presentation/Handout – Troy Christenson, Eastern Washington University.

   • •

     Small and large libraries working together – Forum moderated by Mary Jackson.

Mary E. JacksonAssociation of Research Libraries