Report on the Session: From Wish to Reality:  Interoperability and Interlibrary Loan

Sue Berescik, director of East Hampton Public Library, and Mary Jackson, Product Manager A-Gent Resource Sharing with Auto-Graphics gave an insightful demonstration of the interoperability between two Auto-Graphics products; A-Gent Resource Sharing, known as reQuest in Connecticut and their VERSO ILS system using the NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol. The NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol (NCIP) supports the communication between a library's interlibrary loan system and its circulation system.  In East Hampton, they moved to the VERSO ILS system in 2005 after having used a legacy DYNIX ILS.  With the implementation of two Auto-Graphics products, VERSO and reQuest, and the opening of the NCIP link between them, East Hampton has realized a 75% reduction in the number of allocated staff hours to ILL, which allowed them to redistribute their staff resources to public service.

How does this work?  When a patron searches the catalog, the local holdings appear first, with any reQuest holdings below.  If the item is not held locally, the patron may place a hold on the item owned by a reQuest library, triggers the generation of a borrowing request in reQuest, pulling in information from the patron record. The request then waits in the Awaiting Approval Queue until staff “approve” the request and it is sent.  When the material arrives and the ILL request is updated to “Received”, the ILL system sends an NCIP message to the circulation system.  A temporary bibliographic record is created and the item is placed on hold for the patron and an email is then sent notifying the patron that the item has arrived.  Sue found that the largest cost saving is found on the borrowing side, saving hours of “drudge work” by updating both systems simultaneously.

Mary stressed that in this specific example of VERSO and reQuest both the ILL and ILS send NCIP messages.  CT's reQuest is fully NISO compliant, but not all ILS systems choose to be.  Other vendors have implemented NCIP more narrowly and are able to respond to NICP messages, but not initiate them.  For example, in the case of Innovated Interfaces’ Millennium, Innovated made the decision that Millennium would only receive messages, but not send NCIP messages. ILL staff intervention would then be needed and a specific workflow would be required.  Since reQuest is already fully NISO compliant, any cost for implementing it would be from the library’s current ILS vendor.

Sponsor: Resource Sharing Section

Reporter: Kim Farrington