Managing a busy interlibrary loan operation with limited staff resources requires taking advantage of as many opportunities for system unmediation as possible. IDS Project offers us these opportunities by allowing for efficiencies with copyright, renewals, and lending with our branch libraries. Facilitating copyright, the system does the work for us: it finds the least expensive cost, identifies the cost for us, and routes it into the appropriate queue; renewals are almost completely unmediated; and by using Z39.50, IDS does automated routing of requests to branch queues, cancelling requests for non-circulating locations and checked out items. This combination of IDS logic and ILLiad has created significant staff and cost savings. See what UConn has done to implement this workflow and what it's done for us.
