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The 2008 NC ILL Users Group meeting was held at UNC-Chapel Hill on July 29. It has always been a gathering that I look forward to participating. Not only do we get to hear about the latest developments with OCLC’s products, we get to exchange information and learn what each library is doing.

The meeting started out with Julie Nye updating us on OCLC Resource Sharing (ILL), such as Reasons for No and Conditional, Deflection Enhancements and Auto-IFM trigger for items not updated in time. She reported a 34% increase of participating countries in WorldCat Resouce Sharing. And we are getting more and more ILLs filled by non-US libraries, a 92% increase from last year according to her statistics. She also discussed the WorldCat.org website that OCLC has created and how it can be used to enhance usability for both staff and patrons.

Madeleine Bombeld at UNC-Wilmington did a survey on AV materials lending policies. Her library does loan out to good borrowers the audio books, CDs and VHSs, but not DVDs, which are used heavily, 40% of all circulating materials. At this point, we don’t loan out DVDs, since they are heavily used by our patrons and many for classes. Occasionally, we will send out documentaries to trusted borrowers.

The afternoon session was mainly a report of the WorldCat Group Catalog that the UNC system will implement sometime this year. A group catalog will be created from records already cataloged in WorldCat by the UNC member libraries. From the group catalog, patrons can see which library has the item he wants and requests it. Staff can use it for collection development purpose. There were quite a bit of discussions about the system and it will be interesting to see how it will work out and what the benefits are for both the patrons and the library staff.

Other than all the information I received, I also enjoyed talking to other ILLers. It was nice meeting new faces in the ILL land and exchange information about ILL issues.