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Over 50 ILL Librarians and support staff gathered today in Wake Forest’s Z. Smith Reynolds Library for a day of sharing tips, information and commiseration at the NCILL Users Group Conference.

The day started with light refreshments and a meet and greet in the morning and then the group broke up into two concurrent sessions. The first allowed libraries to talk about the ILLiad Addons that have been developed and how to make them work in other ILLiad Libraries. Cristina and Kevin shared their expertise beautifully and did ZSR proud. The second concurrent session featured Madeline Bombeld, (sister of our own Charles) who discussed Purchase on Demand and the Greening of ILL along with WIlliam Gee.

Madeline Bombeld is on the left in this picture.
The morning concluded with our going over to Benson Center to hear Esther Onega of Univ. of Virgina talk about her involvement with the Google Books Project . She gave a very interesting talk about the impact of the Google Book project on public services in her library and methods they’ve developed to minimize the negative side. Among the challenges she’s faced are the myriad of cataloging problems they’ve unearthed and had to fix before sending the books off to be digitized.

After lunch, the rest of the afternoon took place in Room 204, with Cristina kicking off the afternoon session.

The afternoon was all about Direct Request, and how to go forth and implement it with courage. Many misconceptions about how Direct Request works were cleared up.

Then a Round Table discussion closed out the afternoon session as participants frankly discussed their challenges and concerns. It was a very informative day. We should all be pleased with the work that Ellen, Anna and Tara did under Cristina’s exemplary leadership. I am especially proud of the current and former ILL team today. They represented the library very well and we had a very polished and professional conference, and a worthwhile day entertaining our colleagues while sharing some great information.