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OCLC Support

WorldShare Interlibrary Loan Release Notes, February 2021

 

Release Date: February 21,2021

Introduction

This release of provides several new features in addition to a few bug fixes. These features will help you manage more complex workflows, including:

These enhancements are the direct result of your feedback.

Recommended actions

For this release, we recommend that you review the following checklists and complete the relevant tasks so that you can adjust your policies and workflows and train your staff. These checklists identify updates that we have determined as significant for most institutions. We encourage you to review all of the items in the release notes to determine whether there are other items that might require additional action or follow up by your institution.

Administrative actions

These items require immediate action or decisions.

Action

It's very important to clear your browser's cache before starting to work with WorldShare ILL!

If this link to your library’s catalog has not been set up, or if the link needs to be updated, follow the instructions below. When you have enabled your online catalog links, you can search your catalog for requested items as a borrower or lender.

https://help.oclc.org/Resource_Sharing/WorldShare_Interlibrary_Loan/Reference/Search_my_library's_online_catalog

Have you updated addresses within each of your borrower and lender Constant Data records in OCLC Service Configuration? If not, please do so on behalf of all your borrowing and lending partners.  Address labels do not print properly unless the addresses are formatted correctly.
Have there been any changes in your contact information or lending policies? If so, please make the appropriate updates in OCLC Policies Directory.

Follow-up actions

In an effort to keep your staff informed of new features and changes, you may also want to consider these items.

Action

Share these release notes with your colleagues.

During the COVID-19 crisis, review the information summarized in this News post:

See also:

Gather your team for the upcoming webinar Product Insights: Resource Sharing

Date: Wednesday, April 21, 2020, 2:00pm, Eastern Daylight Time (New York, UTC -04:00)
Registration: https://www.oclc.org/community/interlibrary_loan/events/april-2021.en.html

Have you signed up for email alerts for News in the Community Center? This will ensure that WorldShare Interlibrary Loan release notes and events will come straight to your inbox. 

  

Include Request ID with problem reports 

When reporting an issue with WorldShare Interlibrary Loan, it's very helpful to include the Request ID. Including this information allows us to directly trace what happened on the request we are troubleshooting.

New features and enhancements

Get items to your library's users faster by automatically sorting lender strings by turnaround time

You can now shorten the amount of time library users have to wait to receive items by taking advantage of the Automated Request Manager's ability to sort lender symbols by turnaround time. Symbols in a lender string populated by the Automated Request Manager are now sorted by turnaround time, so that those lenders with the fasted turnaround times occur first. Autmations set to send requests directly to lenders will also utilize turnaround time to send to the fastest lenders first. Automated Request Manager sorts turnaround time separately for each Custom Holdings Group included in the Custom Holdings Path used by the matching automation.  

Turnaround time: Calculated from when a lender is assigned a request to the time when the item is available to the borrower.  

  • For loans: the time from lender assigned to borrower received 
  • For copies: the time from lender assigned to lender shipped (because the item is available digitally immediately from when it's marked shipped)

Each lender's turnaround time for copy and loan requests is calculated separately, using data from the past year. This calculation is performed daily and takes into account consistency over time.

Turnaround time sort takes into account the number of requests in a lender's Can You Supply? queue to prevent overwhelming any given lender. This sorting effectively load balances requests more so than the random sort available previously. Queue depth is calculated hourly.

This is an automatic feature when using Automated Request Manager to build lender strings. To benefit from this new feature, set up automations in OCLC Service Configuration and utilize the action to Build Lender String.

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For more information on setting up automations, see Automated Request Manager.

More efficiently borrow print serials with automated consideration of Local Holdings Records

For automations that have the Build Lender String action, Automated Request Manager now checks a potential lender's Local Holdings Records (LHRs) for the specific volume and year being requested. 

The print serials lender string works together with the turnaround time sort. The turnaround time sort is given precedence, but the print serials lender string built in automation has the benefit of excluding institutions in each Custom Holdings Group that hold the requested title but have LHRs that indicate:

  • The institution does not hold the requested year or volume based on information in the 853 and 863 fields of the LHR
  • The institution haves set up the lend/copy policy in bytes 20 and 21 of the 008 field of the LHR to indicate it will not lend or copy the item on a title level

When the request does not include a date, all institutions that hold the title will be considered for inclusion in the lender string, regardless of LHRs.

For more information, see OCLC local holdings records.

Notes

Aging period extended for problem statusesEdit section

On Tuesday, February 9, the aging period for requests in a problem status was increased to 760 days. This allows you more time to update requests without the worry that some requests will be moved to CLOSED before they can be updated correctly. The following statuses are affected:

  • RECEIVED? – Borrowing library has not yet indicated that a shipped item has been received
  • NOT RECEIVED – Borrowing library has indicated that a shipped item was not received
  • RECEIVED BUT MISSING – Borrowing library received the item but the patron indicates it’s been lost
  • OVERDUE – Borrowing library has not returned an item that is 14 or more days beyond the lender’s due date
  • RETURNED/COMPLETE? – Lending library has not yet indicated that a returned item has been completed
  • RETURNED BUT MISSING – Lending library has indicated that a returned item was not received (is missing)

Bug fixes and known issues

For a list of current and recently fixed issues, see Known issues.

Future releases  

Roadmap information is available in the OCLC Community Center.

Important links

Product Insights: Resource Sharing

To help you become familiar with the enhancements and fixes included in this release, please attend the upcoming webinar Product Insights: Resource Sharing

OCLC Resource Sharing Conference (RSC20) web series

OCLC invites ILL professionals and users of OCLC’s resource sharing solutions to revisit the sessions of the OCLC Resource Sharing Conference 2020 Web Series. In these recordings, we discuss how we’re all moving forward together, including best practices and ways to better connect your users with the information they need as your libraries reopen.

This unique series offers an opportunity to learn about the latest resource sharing advancements. You’ll also learn how to improve your operational efficiency, save time, and elevate user services.

The series included the following sessions: 

Virtual Workshop Series: Learn how to fine-tune your ILL setup

Were you able to join us for all of our Virtual Workshops where we showed how you can optimize your library’s ILL setup and workflows, and save time?

The series included the following topics: 

Support websites

Support information for this product and related products can be found at: