Professional Development

Day two turned out to be jammed packed with informative sessions from Atlas Systems and ILLiad presenters.  To start off the day’s events, Jay Jordon, President and CEO of OCLC, gave the opening remarks geared toward “Building Web-Scale for Libraries.”  As of January 31, 2008 OCLC has cataloged over 97 million records and 1.21 billion holdings.  In addition to discussing OCLC’s relationship with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft and highlighting it’s release of www.worldcat.org, Mr. Jordan discussed their efforts and initiatives geared at building this web-scale for libraries.  Such initiatives include a new Facebook widget, WorldCat Local, WorldCat Delivery (pilot program), WorldCat Lists, and WorldCat Identities.  Finally, Mr. Jordan debuted a new logo for OCLC; three circles linked together, Local, Group, and Global, each connected to next.

I next went to a session entitled, Give the People What they Want: How to Use Surveys, Focus Groups, and Usability Studies to Modify your ILLiad Interfacepresented by Jon Mark Bolthouse from the University of Wisconsion Colleges.  This presentation focused on how to conduct successful surveys, focus groups, and usabilitues studies to improve the ILLiad web interfaces and thus improve customer services and relations.  Bolthouse discussed the differences, advantages, and disadvantages to each method of data collecting. 

Another session, given by Kevin Ford of Atlas Systems, highlighted the new features, functions, and error messages of ILLiad 7.3.  While ILLiad 7.3 interfaces, both public and staff views, will not change in this upgrade, 7.3 offers many new features aimed at streamlining the staff processing workflows.  Upgrade features include automatic email delays, Odyssey delivery enhancements, and expanded “stop sign” error messaging (stop sign icon indicates errors in record maintenance). 

My last session for the day was an interesting and highly-emotional round table discussion concerning Copyright Compliance and Interlibrary Loan policies and practices.  Round table leaders included Amanda Henk (DePauw University), Michelle Foss (University of Florida), John Brunswick (Atlas Systems), and Dru Zuretti (Copyright Compliance Center).  Most of the discussion focused around issues with the Copyright Compliance Center, Section 108 of the copyright policy, and managing copyright permissions in ILLiad, and royalty fees and ILL budgets.