Shortcut To IBorrow Portal
Its location and appearance vary, but somewhere on your online catalog each of you has a link to iBorrow. This enables your patrons to use iBorrow’s search and request powers, when they don’t find what they need in your own catalog. We’ve uncovered a problem with this link, and we’d like to work with you to correct it. Here’s the issue.
Some of you use OCLC as your Lender Of Last Resort. Some of you don’t. If you do, you want your patron’s searches to include OCLC. If you don’t, you want to exclude OCLC. So, we actually have two different public portals. They look alike, but only one of them searches OCLC.
To guide your patrons to the right portal, we listed all the participating libraries on our main iBorrow page in two distinct groups and–next to each group–put a Start Your Search button that takes the user to the right public portal. You can see this at http://iborrow.org
This will come as a shock to you, but some people don’t read the list before clicking on a Search button. So, they wind up in the wrong portal and get either too many or too few results when they search.
We’re redesigning the page to make it harder to choose the “wrong” library. But the simplest solution for most of you is to simply skip our page altogether. If the link on your own online catalog has an explanation of where it is sending the user and why it’s doing that, you could send them straight to the correct portal and skip our page.
Here’s how you’d do that.
If you use OCLC as your Lender Of Last Resort, you can send your patrons directly to:
If you don’t use OCLC as your LOLR, you should send your patrons to:
This may look confusing to you, but your Web person will know exactly how to use this.
If you have questions about this, please give me a call. But, if you are clear on the problem and the solution, you can just go ahead.
–Al Carlson