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March 17th. Where I attended the 2016 ILLiad Conference on Virginia Beach, VA. from Tuesday, March 15, through Thursday there were over 335 attendees at the conference. This was my second experience at the ILLiad conference, and I wanted to share a few things, including updated information about the ILLiad software.

Mary Sauer-Games, Vice President, Product Management, OCLC presented on Wednesday morning about “Interlibrary Loan in the Life of Your Users”. She talked about millennials and generation X. How millennials (Born 1977- present) spend more time on mobile/ electronic devices, how these users are requesting more materials electronic then the actual physical hard copy. Where the generation X (born 1965 – 1976) prefers the hard copy, paper copy of materials.

In addition to attending several sessions, the most memorable were presented by Kurt Munson, Northwestern University “Half the Work: Circulating Lending and Borrowing Request from ILLiad in Alma Using NCIP. He explains how they checkout and update all their materials in one system where we now have to update in ILLiad and check out in voyager. Kurt explains how circulation interchange protocol z allows for the exchange of an ILLiad supports for NCIP message to create a brief record, then it allows you update both records. This also applies to the borrowing check in.
Another relevant session Stan Huzarewicz, University of Connecticut “Stop saying “No”: Improving Fill rates and Reducing Lending Denials in Interlibrary Loan. He talked about how his library conditional there requests instead of saying “no”. How after carefully verifying request if unable to fill they will conditional the request to the requesting library, This request is not showing unfilled by his Library.

I also enjoyed networking and meeting new people and hearing about their workflow and how they daily operation is at their university.