REQUEST MANAGEMENT: LEGACY SYSTEMS, CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

AND NEXT-GEN DAYDREAMSSarah Kasten

OVGTSL ConferenceMay 15, 2018

The team■ ILLAS Request Fulfillment & Customer Service team: responsible for processing

interlibrary borrowing requests in ILLiad and order requests for all library firm order acquisitions (all formats).

■ Merger of firm order acquisitions and ILL borrowing functions into one team in Summer 2015.

■ I started in May 2016, about a year after the merger of ILL & Acquisitions.– Background in acquisitions and serials (Aleph), immediately charmed by ILLiad

and ILL work.

■ “Very comfortably” staffed to… less comfortably staffed: 5 team members from “merger” into summer 2017. Retirements were anticipated but no specific details until notice given. Two staff members retired in August and December 2017, down to three with no plans to refill the positions.

The work■ Request volume, averages 700/week combined purchase orders (subject librarians)

and ILL (ND students, faculty, staff); fairly regular ebbs and flows in volume throughout the year.

■ Acquisitions: Calendar year 2017: $3,029,318 spent on 13,520 individual orders.

■ ILL: 25,000-30,000 requests per year. About 8,000-10,000 filled unmediated.

■ Also: general customer service (patrons, subject librarians), claiming firm orders, acquisitions admin

The systems■ Aleph: early 1980s, adopted here early 2000s

■ ILLiad: 1997, adopted early/mid 2000s

■ Home-grown online order request form for subject librarians to submit purchase requests. No integration with other utilities. Most subject librarians use it regularly, if not exclusively, for their firm order requests outside of vendor slip selection in Harrassowitz, Gobi, Casalini, AmaLivre.

■ ILL request management entirely handled within ILLiad.– Progressive queuing, status and flagging options– ILLiad community: add-ons & system integrations developed over the years to

enhance ILLiad functionality. Primo, Gobi, Amazon, Google, Google Scholar, GIST, RapidILL, Get it Now, Internet Archive, ProQuest Dissertations and Thesis, OATD, etc.

■ Acquisitions processes largely ‘manual’ from the intake of requests, creating records in Aleph, to sending our orders to vendors.

■ Expectation to migrate to a new LMS and new ILL system in the next few years.

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

Jan-17 Feb-17 Mar-17 Apr-17 May-17 Jun-17 Jul-17 Aug-17 Sep-17 Oct-17 Nov-17 Dec-17 Jan-18 Feb-18 Mar-18

ILL & Firm Order Vol. by Month

ILL Monthly total Firm Order Monthly total

Social Sciences

Phone calls

Paper forms

Telepathy (jk)

Rare phone call, snail mail order

Auctions

Acquisitions Request

Management

Humanities

Sciences

Special Collections

Specialized Branches

Order Request Form

Online Slip Selection

Email

Printouts

Online Vendor System

Ecommerce (Amazon,

specialized sellers)

Email Directly

30+ Subject Librarians

Reserves, Circulation

The Life of a SIMPLE Firm Order Request

Export bib record to Aleph; or make

stub record.

ID copy for sale online or contact

info for seller.

Proceed with checkout on

website; draft email to seller

Request to the DONE/Discard

pile

Order Request Received in Team

Email.

Back to email for link provided on

request

Request email opened, printed,

archived

Create order record in Aleph,

data entry

Duplicate check in Aleph

Team members reorganize the papers

on their desks to include the new

requests.

Printouts sorted according to

priority, format, subject librarian.

Printouts handed out to team members.

Search OCLC Connexion for bib

record

Add Aleph PO to order, submit order to seller.

Update order record with vendor info; update to SV

15 stages with multiple steps in web browser (email, seller sites), ILS, OCLC; re-searching in each application.

Human routing, organization, prioritization of requests.

Can eliminate some of the extra keying, searching, organizing work here.

Phone calls

Paper forms

Telepathy (jk)

Rare phone call, snail mail order

AuctionsAcquisitions

Request Management

(multiple sources & systems)

Humanities

Social Sciences

Sciences

Special Collections

Specialized Branches

Order Request Form

Online Slip Selection

Email

Printouts

Online Vendor System

Ecommerce (Amazon,

specialized sellers)

Email Direct

ILL Request Management

(ILLiad-based)

ILL Patrons (3,000-4000 per year)

ILLiad web forms

ILL Requests RESOLVED

(Sent, Canceled, Routed to Doc Del, DDA, etc)

“Blended” Team w/o real integration

Reserves, Circulation

Acquisitions request management■ Hard to “supervise.”

– Who’s got which paper on their desk? – How many other papers do they have on their desk? – Did a request get lost in the traffic of our team email? – Did we order everything we were asked to?

■ Don’t have a way to directly compare workload of ILL requests (patrons are important!) with our acquisitions request volume (more patron-driven requests! collection purchasing is important too).

■ Tighter queue management can help make time for important non-transactional work. Workflow analysis, staff training/development, documentation….

■ How much we have to do vs. how much we did. Evaluating capacity vs. reporting productivity. A BIG RUNAROUND to get stats on order requests received vs. orders placed.

Getting order requests into ILLiad: WHY■ ILLiad as a ticketing system.

– Progressive queueing to keep track of order status: waiting vendor confirmation, purchase order placed, pre-publication

– ILLiad routing rules would self-sort order requests. Rush, Media, Special Collections, etc. Whatever is important to help staff stay organized.

■ Team would be able to see order request volume and ILL request volume in one place and (ideally) be able to allocate time better throughout the week.

■ Add-ons would help us develop some efficiencies in ordering process. Amazon, Gobi, Connexion, Google. Automated searching directly from ILLiad request.

■ Much easier to pull reports and statistics from ILLiad than Aleph on order requests.

Rare phone call, snail mail order

Auctions

HumanitiesSocial

Sciences

Sciences

Special Collections

Specialized Branches

Order Request

Form

Online Slip Selection

Online Vendor

Systems

Ecommerce (Amazon,

specialized sellers)

Email sellers directly

ILL Requests Sent, Canceled, Routed to Doc Del, RESOLVED

ILLiad Queues

Vendor Sites

ILL Patrons

ILLiad web forms

Request Management

Reserves, Circulation

Getting order requests into ILLiad: HOW

■ Idea #1. Manipulating ILLiad web forms.

– Tinkered with it, but it lacked some features of the existing form.

– Not sure if I had the time/capacity to get 30+ subject librarians adapted to the new form.

– Change management component & Short term solutions –looking at another change in 2 years. Minimizing change where it doesn’t add value.

New patron status for Selectors; New Purchase

Request form only visible to this patron status.

Getting order requests into ILLiad: HOW■ Idea #2. ILLiad Email Import Function, use our existing order request form to deposit order

requests in a dedicated email account. ILLiad importing requests with POP connection every 10 minutes.

1. Existing request form2. Dedicated email account

3. Requests Queued in ILLiad via POP

Has nice features for populating fund codes, cataloging locations, WorldCat API for bib data import.

Settings in Customization ManagerOrder form fields mapped to ILLiad fields. Routing rules, custom queues, & custom email templates created to facilitate organizing requests and sending messages to vendors and subject librarians.

Relabeling/hijacking ILLiad transaction table fields to accommodate acquisitions data (as well as ILL data)

Add-ons, Notifications, and Queue Views■ ILLiad Custom Queues created for acquisitions requests, organized by sys routing rules.

Can edit ILLiad client settings to display queues in whatever order.

Add-ons, Notifications, and Queue Views■ ILLiad add-ons: can do a good amount of searching and purchasing activity within the ILLiad client. Most add-ons

are designed to auto-search titles and ISBNs to reduce searching/keying.

Add-ons, Notifications, and Queue Views■ ILLiad email notifications: can have established templates to send messages to vendors or send questions back to

subject librarians. Correspondence recorded in the system and BCC’d our team email.

Requests will route to “Purchase Order Placed,” “Awaiting Vendor Response,” etc. custom queues depending on the message sent.

The Life of a SIMPLE Firm Order Request becomes more

SIMPLE.

Export bib record to Aleph; or make

stub record.

Use addons to find copy for sale

online

Proceed with checkout on

website; email order template.

Request closed, routed to Custom

Queue

Order Request Received in Team

Email.

Create order record in Aleph,

data entry

Duplicate check in Aleph

Team members monitor queues as they work for volume and high priority

requests

Requests system sorted.

Search OCLC Connexion for bib

record

Add Aleph PO to ILLiad record,

submit order to seller.

Update order record with vendor info; update to SV

Can complete simple transactions within ILLiad and Aleph only. Only have to do a title search in Aleph for a duplication check.

Obviously, this simple workflow won’t suit for all our orders, but it’ll help reduce small work and decisions that take time without adding value.

1 minutes saved per request @ 13,500 requests = ~28 workdays/year

Recommend to a friend?■ This exact set up? Probably not….

– Several weeks for OCLC and Atlas to help us resolve some issues with the Email Import function. Surprise, not widely used!

– Some trouble with non-Roman characters and diacritics.– ILLiad/Request form data map makes my head spin a little. – A unique response to a specific situation/people/technical infrastructure.

■ Am I happy I did this work (and roped other people into it too)? Yep.– Good short term solution for the team: more efficient ordering process and

better queue management when our staffing levels require us to think more carefully about how we’re spending our time.

– Help us stay organized and productive with fewer staff members but with a lot of demands and shifting priorities; improve audit trail documentation.

Some inspiration■ System that has an embedded request management function!

■ System that can help us manage acquisitions communications

■ System can integrate with vendor systems, outside sources of information. Price comparisons, “buy or borrow?” axis, automatic searching and data population as you’re working among interfaces.

■ System as a platform flexible to librarians’ needs and creativity.

■ System allows easy, real time access to data. Canned reports, custom reports. Data from multiple functions can be sourced from the same place.

■ No system will be perfect though….

Some takeaways….

■ Adopting Agile principles in our department: Thinking about “Requests Received” vs. “Work Done” in terms of staffing capacity and prioritization.

■ Helpful to see how other library operations and systems work in order to evaluate how your local practices work. Plug for blending historically disparate library functions.

■ Workflows are so heavily dependent on our tools that it’s impossible to think about one without the other. Do our systems enable us to work they way we’d like or are we conforming our work to our systems? Who’s winning?

■ Keep pushing on your workflows whether your systems are young or old. There’s probably a better way to do things and our business practices need to adapt if we’re going to accommodate emerging areas, as well as changes in the marketplace.

■ “Stop doing things”: doesn’t need to mean whole services, can mean small elements of workflows. Continue supporting “legacy” operations, and find ways to do them better.

Thanks for listening!

Questions?