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I have worked in OCLC Resource Sharing for more than 33 years and I think that librarians are born with a \u2018togetherness\u2019 gene. Sharing is one of our profession\u2019s bedrock values\u2014sharing work, sharing collections, sharing knowledge. Nowhere is this value practiced more diligently than with interlibrary loan. We build our collections and share our materials with a commitment to serve our users\u2014who we consider to be anyone, anywhere in the world!<\/p>\n
It stands to reason, then, that resource sharing is one of the most popular topics on our Next<\/em> blog. As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of OCLC ILL this year, I invite you to enjoy three of our most-read resource sharing posts again.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nThe resource sharing gene: still going strong after 40 years! #OCLCnext <\/a><\/span>Share on X<\/a><\/span>\n By George Bishop, District Media Specialist at Ovid-Elsie Area Schools, Retired<\/em><\/p>\n By Robyn Clark-Bridges, MLIS, Reference and Interlibrary Loan Librarian, Mount Mercy University<\/em><\/p>\nHow OCLC transformed a library \u2026 and one student\u2019s life<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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At the beginning of the 1992\u20131993 school year, I issued a challenge to teachers, students, administrators, and community members around the Ovid-Elsie Area Schools in Michigan. Our small, rural library, which supported two elementary schools, a middle school, and a high school, had recently joined OCLC and for the first time had access to libraries worldwide through WorldCat. Even though our materials budget was tiny, I stood up in the first district staff meeting of the year and promised them all I would get any book that anyone needed for any reason. The teachers whispered and even snickered. Our library had never been very relevant to them. We weren\u2019t included in their lesson plans, and they rarely sent students to find resources. After a couple weeks, I got my first request: a 17-book bibliography. And that changed everything. Read more<\/a>\u00a0…<\/em><\/p>\nThree cures for the \u201cHumdrum ILL Blues\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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A few years ago, two colleagues and I co-led the popular workshop \u201cKeep the ILL Motivational Fires Burning!\u201d at the Midwest ILL Conference. The point was to openly acknowledge that\u2014like many jobs\u2014resource sharing librarianship can become routine and draining. We tried to answer the question: how can you do a job with many necessary, detailed, repetitious job functions while still maintaining energy, enthusiasm, and drive? While everyone\u2019s answer is going to be slightly different, I think we uncovered a few ways that might help you maintain your LOVE for a job that many of us got into in the first place because of a passion for helping library users. Read more<\/a>\u00a0…<\/em><\/p>\nTales from the international ILL world<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Back in 1988, one of my OCLC colleagues worked at The Ohio State University Law Library as a work-study student. Recently, he told me a story about going deep into the basement to the compact storage units to retrieve an 1870s law book to photocopy some Ohio municipal codes for a library in Japan. He mailed the document to the library the next day using the US Postal Service. Today, 30 years later, the world of international interlibrary loan is alive and well but with fewer trips to the \u2018dungeon\u2019 and the post office, thanks to digitization, electronic publications, and advances in scanning technology. These advances, along with the web and the emerging global library data network, are making international borrowing and lending easier and more commonplace. But it\u2019s the stories behind these international transactions that make them memorable, inspiring, and fun.