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On Thursday, July 30, Tara Hauser and I headed for Chapel Hill and the annual NC Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery Conference. This year the pre-conference and the conference were held at the UNC School of Law. We have combined our efforts to report on our experience.

Tara won the opportunity for ILLiad training at a casino night at the ILLiad Conference last March and James Harper negotiated with Atlas Systems to offer the pre-conference to ILL/Document Delivery representatives from North Carolina academic libraries.

On Thursday we attended the pre-conference, “The DIY ILLiad Tune-Up”, which was presented by John Brunswick with Atlas Systems. The ILLiad Tune-Up is needed to keep up with new enhancements that could improve services and productivity.

Different topics that were covered include routing rules, email routing and templates, Printing processes, the Database manager, Client layout customizations, Web page customization and shared servers. All of which was very helpful. All those who attended were able to get a six month subscription to the Atlas Video Training Library.

On Friday we had about 70 representatives from Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery departments across the state. Almost all were from academic institutions with one governmental librarian. The day started with some lightning round/discussion sessions about relevant topics. They were supposed to be limited to 5 minutes each but that guideline pretty much went out the window in the Q & A/discussion phase but that’s the best part about this conference; sharing discoveries, frustrations and innovations with other libraries.

Discussions included “green” and cost-saving options for packaging and the advantages of using “purchase on demand” for some items instead of ILL. Mailing and delivery options are always important in ILL departments so the UNC courier system was discussed as well as free tracking for USPS packages (even at library rates). James led a discussion on the importance of using statistics to demonstrate how ILL supports faculty as well as a session speculating on The Future of ILL and Document Delivery. After lunch there was a free discussion time. One of the main topics of the afternoon was thefts in our libraries and we found that ZSR is certainly not alone in having these problems.

This get-together is always a highlight of the year. Given the collaborative nature of ILL it’s a good time to meet with the people we depend on to help us demonstrate that ZSR Delivers.