ILLiad and the Medical Library World
Kevin O’Brien
Assistant Access Services Librarian
University of Illinois at Chicago
The world of library resource sharing is undergoing a period of change. Electronic journals and freely available content like the material in PubMed Central are contributing to a decline in demand for interlibrary loan service as it has been traditionally defined. In response, many libraries are changing the way they do business. For example, items previously classified as non-circulating, such as audiovisual and reference materials, may now be part of the loan circuit. Despite these ongoing changes, the need for information beyond that held in one single library collection is still substantial enough that interlibrary loan under the umbrella of fair use provisions in copyright law will be around as a core library service for some time to come.
A number of products designed to manage interlibrary loan transactions are available to libraries wanting to move beyond in-house record keeping solutions. The hospital library community is familiar with QuickDOC and academic medical libraries may use or borrow from libraries using Clio. The National Library of Medicine uses Relais Enterprise. Another product that is rapidly gaining wide use in the academic library world is ILLiad™, an interlibrary loan management system developed by Atlas Systems, Inc. and distributed by OCLC.
ILLiad was designed primarily to manage requests in OCLC’s interlibrary loan messaging system and it handles this task quite well. New lending requests and updates are communicated to OCLC behind the scenes. ILLiad users need only to refresh the main menu display to see numbers of new requests and requests updated to shipped status.
DOCLINE® System requests require more intervention on the part of interlibrary loan staff. Interaction between DOCLINE and ILLiad takes place with DOCLINE open in a web browser and requests manually imported and exported to and from the two systems. In my six months of experience of ILLiad I have found the system’s interaction with DOCLINE on the lending side to be quite good.
The transfer of new requests updates between the two systems is reliable, although rejects (ILLiad uses the term cancels) need to be handled with close attention. Since rejected request numbers are manually copied from ILLiad and pasted into DOCLINE, users must be sure that the correct reason for not being able to fill is chosen before clicking on update.
ILLiad will manage the Electronic Fund Transfer System (EFTS) efficiently, provided that libraries participating in the system are indicated as such in the ILLiad entry for the institution. Each filled request for an EFTS participant can be exported to a text file by ILLiad for uploading to the EFTS web site on a monthly basis.
ILLiad offers the option for web request forms for small hospitals or other institutions not participating in OCLC or DOCLINE to submit requests directly to the ILLiad database. This is an attractive option for those wanting to move away from faxed ALA interlibrary loan forms.
One quirk of DOCLINE in the Greater Midwest Region is that at least three participating institutions have the word rush in their names. ILLiad misinterprets these requests as being a rush status and assigns them to a special queue for expedited processing.
ILLiad’s interaction with DOCLINE, while good overall, requires special attention by ILL staff. Requests retired as unfilled in DOCLINE must be manually updated as such in ILLiad. Ignoring unfilled DOCLINE requests runs the risk of these requests lingering forgotten in the sent status in ILLiad. Returnable items borrowed through DOCLINE necessitate a due date being added manually to ILLiad.
Managing Loansome Doc® traffic in ILLiad allows for some creativity. New Loansome Doc requests are imported into ILLiad’s borrowing module. They can be handled there or transferred to ILLiad’s document delivery module, depending on how you define your Loansome Doc service. When Loansome Doc requests transferred into DOCLINE are indicated as filled on the Activity and Status page, those requests need to be updated in ILLiad.
Filled Loansome Doc requests can be posted to the web inside the ILLiad environment. Loansome Doc patrons will have to be alerted as to their initial password, but once successfully logged in, they can reset it to one of their choice.
ILLiad users should also be aware that when receiving requests transferred by other institutions into DOCLINE from Loansome Doc, ILLiad will not recognize that the ship to and bill to fields are different and will simply print the ship to address associated with the LIBID from which the request originated. This may result in institutions having to pass on articles to their Loansome Doc patrons rather than having them delivered directly by the filling institution.
One innovation ILLiad has introduced is Odyssey, its scan and send component. This feature allows ILLiad users to deliver and receive documents to and from each other. Documents received via Odyssey require a minimum amount of attention before delivery to the patron as a PDF posted to the web. If an ILLiad user decides that an institution delivers documents of a consistently acceptable quality, documents delivered by that institution can be posted to the web with no staff intervention required.
Atlas Systems makes available a free version of Odyssey for libraries that do not use ILLiad but want to be able to receive documents from ILLiad users. This standalone version of Odyssey may be of interest to hospital libraries and other small institutions that do not use Ariel but want to have option other than e-mail delivery for interlibrary loan documents.
Because of the close connection between ILLiad and OCLC’s interlibrary loan messaging system, libraries that deal primarily with DOCLINE may not feel that the product is right for them. Academic medical libraries and large hospital library operations that handle a high volume of interlibrary loan traffic may find it a good fit, however. ILLiad has definitely carved out a place for itself in the interlibrary loan world and may well begin to make its presence felt in the medical library world as well.
Pricing information for ILLiad is available on the OCLC web site.
