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Collections, Schedule and Contacts

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Find information about creating descriptions of unique collections that you supply, listing your departments operating hours and closures, and creating contacts for interlibrary loan or document delivery.

Policies Directory can be used to manage policies for your library's Collections, Schedule, and Contact information.

Collections

Create descriptions of each unique collection that you supply (or do not supply) to borrowing libraries. If you have a URL link to a collection’s description, enter it on the Collections tab.

If you enter collections on the Collections tab, they are also available on the Policies tab for selection in creating copy and loan policies.

Schedule

The format of dates and times displays in the interface based on the information about your institution contained in the WorldCat Registry. Dates and times will display to library staff in your institution's time zone and preferred format.

  • Operating Hours - List your department’s normal operating hours. Note that this is informational only and will not automatically set your symbol to nonsupplier during hours in a day in which you are closed (nor is that necessary to do). This information is useful to borrowing and lending partners so that they know when to contact you and when your department is open to receiving ILL requests.
  • Closures - If you know about any scheduled closures in advance (holiday breaks, staff vacations, library moving projects, etc.) you can use the closures section to set your library to nonsupplier status and back to supplier automatically on dates you define. Closures are timed based on 00:00 in your institution’s time zone. Time zone scheduled closures will all begin and end at 00:00 local time on the dates you specify.
    • Non-supplier status starts at 00:00 on the start date and ends at 00:00 on the end date of the closure in your timezone.
      • For example, if the start date of the closure is set to October 1 and the end date of the closure as October 3, then your non-supplier status will be in effect from October 1 at 00:00 to October 3 at 00:00. This means that October 1 and 2 will be included in the closure, but any requests submitted on October 3 after 00:00 will go through. To include the entire day of October 3 in the closure, set the closure's end date to the next day, October 4. This will include all of October 3 in the closure but will omit October 4.
    • Non-supplier status affects the borrowing library's ability to add your library to the lender string when a request is created. Lending requests that do not have your library as the first in the lending string can move to your library on a day that you are set as a non-supplier and still appear in your queue without being deflected. 

    •  Note: It is recommended to set the Supplier Status to No 4 days before your closing date to prevent conditional requests from returning to the request queue during your closure period.

 Note: 

  • Changing Supplier status on the Profile tab overrides any Supplier status you may have set on the Schedule tab (under Closures). However, during Closure periods Supplier status is checked on the Schedule tab every hour. If the two statuses conflict, the status on the Profile tab is changed to match the status on the Schedule tab. The only time the two statuses might conflict is during a Closure period. See Change Supplier Status for more information. 
  • OCLC counts standard working days (Monday-Friday) as system days/working days. OCLC does not count Saturdays and Sundays as system days/working days. See also Request Aging.

Contacts

Create multiple contacts. We highly recommend that you maintain your current contact information.

Have the following information available:

  • A list of contacts for interlibrary loan or document delivery. List contacts for lending and borrowing. In many cases, this contact may be one person. Other contacts might be in billing, returns, general, etc. A complete list of contact types is located in the drop-down box on the Add Contacts workform.
  • Each contact's phone, email, fax, or other communication numbers or addresses.
     Note: You may list as much contact information as each contact wishes to be made public.
  • Addresses for each contact, if they differ from the main shipping address.
  • For Electronic contact types, use the Attention: field to note the type of electronic contact (Skype, Yahoo messenger, etc.) and the URL: field to define the specific address (if one is needed).