Join us for two presentations. Presentation 1, "The side effects of ILL: How ILL requests sparked collaboration and impacted holdings" and presentation 2, "OCR they? A data project to estimate how many ILL borrowing documents have optical character recognition."

Presentation 1
The side effects of ILL: How ILL requests sparked collaboration and impacted holdings 
1:00 – 2:00 pm, EDT 

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 Librarian, 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

Presentation 2 lightning talk
OCR they? A data project to estimate how many ILL borrowing documents have optical character recognition 
2 :00 - 2:30 p.m. 

What percentage of documents delivered to patrons through ILL have Optical Character Recognition (OCR)? At the University of Minnesota Libraries, we set out to answer this question. Requests for articles and chapters are filled from both electronic and print resources. Electronic resources are usually already machine-readable, but scans from print require the application of OCR or later remediation. For libraries looking at using a fee-based OCR tool, knowing this percentage will help with cost estimates. Additionally, OCR remediation can take time, so knowing how many documents will likely need to go through the process will help practitioners and vendors as they think through the workflow possibilities. This session will present a project where we evaluated the PDF files delivered to our patrons to get a better sense of how many documents have OCR versus those that do not. We evaluated documents delivered during two months in 2023 and one month in 2025. We will share our findings, including the unexpected issues that surfaced.  

 Speakers:

• Melissa Eighmy Brown, Director, Content Acquisition & Delivery, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities Libraries
• Guy Peterson, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities Libraries