Erasmus Staff Training Week @ ULiège Library

Presenter: Isàvena Opisso-Atienza, ILL Manager (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)

Abstract:

The Interlibrary Loan Service of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) has always been a service in constant renewal. The working process of the libraries service of the UAB facilitates and enhances implementing improvement process, procedures and work instructions.

During so many years improvement actions have focused in improve ILL Services. During Covid lockdown, the Ill Teams carried out a global rethink on how support students, researchers, and teachers. We analysed what we were doing, how we were doing, why we were doing it and especially what needs to be done. We proceed to create new services in collaboration with other library and university departments.

We present three new projects that we have implemented with the collection management department, the institutional repository department, and the doctoral thesis department.

• Collection management: Patrons request by ILL those documents that are not available in the UAB library collection. The systematic analysis of the requests makes the possibility to detect titles that are requested by various UAB users. This analysis allows us to inform collection managers about these titles, and they can decide to purchase and incorporate them into our collection.
• Upload to the repository the documents of the ILL Requests from the rare books and antique document collection: Until now, the document requested was digitized and made available to the requester. We have created a procedure to upload to the institutional repository those documents digitized that are free of copyright.
• Doctoral thesis: Spanish doctoral theses prior to 2011 that are not digitized, can not be digitized without the author’s permissions. There are also several restrictions on consultation and photocopying.

When another University informs us that one of its users is interested in digitizing a thesis, we may deny the request because we cannot digitize it without the author’s permission.

There is usually only one copy of the thesis at the university where the author defended it. If the thesis was defended at the UAB and we reject the request, the researcher will hardly be able to consult t anywhere else.

We have created a work instruction to locate the author, although this is not always possible. If we locate the author, we help him/her to carry out all the administrative procedures to authorize the digitization and the upload to the institutional repository.

Collaboration with other library and university departments offers many opportunities to create new value-added services for interlibrary loan department and the ability to work together to detect user needs and be able to provide better service.