General Description of the Project:
The landscape of teaching, learning and research has changed requiring the need for diverse information resources. Researchers and scholars require an information-rich environment, enabling discovery, and reflection leading to the creation of new knowledge (Shrauger and Scharf, 2017). The budget for acquisition or subscriptions of information resources is limited and do not satisfy the demands of all researchers or scholars. Furthermore, the projected federal budget cuts to the Higher Education Act for Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI), could impact information sources for research and acquisition or subscriptions (https://www.educationdive.com/news/minority-serving-institutions-poised-to-lose-255m-in-federal-funding/564145/). Given the current budgetary constraints and financial conditions prevailing in many universities, sharing of information resources has become a necessity. The development of collaboration strategies for information sharing through interlibrary loans (ILL) services have become an important service to reduce the gap of information needed by researchers or scholars. The following is a case study of 9 higher education institutions in Puerto Rico which has integrated successfully an automated online interlibrary loans system to their Virtual Library, that captures instantly the bibliographical data of an information resource from the list of the search results. This process reduces the users ILL request time and provides them with more information resources in a cost-effective manner. The aim of this presentation is to analyze the results of this service. A satisfaction survey was provided to measure success with positive results.
Description of the Technology(ies) Used:
EBSCO ILL Integrated Form: Provides an easy, pre-populated interlibrary loan (ILL) form for users. With the app, patrons simply click the link next to the record in the virtual library to make a request and a pre-formatted email is sent directly to the library administrator.
OCLC WorldShare Interlibrary Loan: automates interlibrary borrowing and lending processes though the largest resource-sharing network in the world that to ensures timely delivery of items to researchers or scholars.
Highlights:
The proposed presentation will provide a process workflow of researchers or scholars search and information needs using the best practice and compare it to non-best practice users. It will also provide a live demonstration of the best practice and present the results of the assessment to researchers or scholars.