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Web series starting
March 2025

RSC Agenda

Sign in today to register for upcoming RSC25 sessions. Anyone using any OCLC interlibrary loan service can use WorldShare ILL or Tipasa credentials to sign in. Don't remember or don't have credentials? You can request them using the button below.

Wednesday, April 9, 2025
Double feature: "ILL: Intra-library liaising to improve ILL" and "Enhancing visual literacy for ILL"
Join us for two presentations. Presentation one, "ILL: Intra-Library Liasing to improve Interlibrary Loan" and presentation two, "Enhancing visual literacy for navigating ILL services."  Presentation 1 ILL: Intra-library Liaising to improve Interlibrary Loan 11:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT ILL employees collaborate widely throughout the library to provide ILL services to our patrons and to libraries around the world, as well as to assist many of our colleagues with their work. We use nearly all the collections and speak with all the service desks and branches. We work with Acquisitions, Cataloging, and Electronic Resources to purchase and discover items, and to report holdings and access issues. We find items needing repair for Preservation/Conservation and often are the first to discover and report system downtimes or glitches to Library Technology. We support liaisons and collection development with ILL request data to show potential collection needs. We cross-train within ILL and with Circulation to ensure coverage and a holistic view. This session will explore these and many other examples and provide tips on how your ILL operation can work with -- and often support and learn from -- your colleagues throughout the entire library to improve services, collections, and employee enrichment. Speaker: William Gee, Head of Interlibrary Loan, East Carolina University Presentation 2 lightning talk Enhancing visual literacy for navigating ILL services  12:00 - 12:30 pm  Although many users find the ILL process essential for obtaining access to worldwide resources, some find it too complex and intimidating. Libraries and staff have recognized this need to simplify the user experience through enhanced visual literacy. This session will focus on creating and implementing audio-visual aids that help users navigate ILL services. We will discuss assessing this need, developing scripts and images that boost user confidence while promoting inclusivity, and incorporating captions and jargon definitions to improve accessibility. These aids can be as intricate or simple as any institution may need them to be, from visual staff instructions to animated figures. This method uses visual tasks, storytelling, and intuitive design to work around common pain points, enhance user autonomy, and improve equitable access to library resources.  Speaker: Alexandra M. Griffiths, Library Technical Assistant IV, The New York Public Library
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  • RSC
Wednesday, May 7, 2025
Double feature: "The side effects of ILL" and "OCR they? An optical character recognition project"
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 
Labels:
  • RSC