Beth’s Blog

IBorrow is going away at the end  of this month.  You know that.  And you know that its replacement will have some kind of OCLC flavor to it.  But it gets kind of fuzzy after that.  Will our patrons be using FirstSearch?  WorldCat?  FloridaCat?  Or that new Navigator thingy?  And what about the staff side?  How much of what iBorrow did automatically will still get done that way?
 
The deeper you dig in to this, the more complicated it gets, so let’s start at a nice, shallow simple level.  To allow your patrons to continue to place their own request, you will need to give them access to FloridaCat through your web site and authenticate them, as they move from your system to OCLC.  Read that again.  Lock it in.  As it gets more complicated, it all comes back to that.
 
Let’s complicate “access to FloridaCat” first.  OCLC is a huge organization.  They offer many services.  One of them is an Interlibrary Loan management tool called FirstSearch.  FirstSearch can be used with a number of ‘databases’  The best known of these is WorldCat.  FloridaCat is also a database.  It is a subset of WorldCat, composed of–Surprise!–titles owned by libraries in Florida.  The Admin section of FirstSearch lets you specify which databases various kinds of users will see.  You want your staff to see the sophisticated FirstSearch screen.  You want to pass your patrons on to the simpler and more appropriate FloridaCat search screen.  Both of these–and other OCLC services–are web sites that you reach through a browser.  Since you control your own web site, you would put in the link that goes to FloridaCat.
 
Your ILL staff authenticate in FirstSearch by logging in.  OCLC doesn’t recognize them as individuals through this login.  But it knows what library they are coming from.  You don’t want your patrons to log in as staff.  But you do want OCLC to know what their home library is.  No mystery as to why.  When they request a title, you want the copy that is captured to come to you, not to Boise, Idaho, or somewhere.
 
So, how do we tell the OCLC FirstSearch system what the patron’s home library is?  Two ways.  We’ll do the easy one first:  IP address.
 
Each of your library buildings has unique IP address, and OCLC knows what it is.  If a patron is in one of your library buildings, when he makes a request, the IP address he comes from tells OCLC which library system he’s coming from.

In ‘the old days’ that would have been plenty.  Now it’s not.  Lots and lots of patrons do their library shopping from home.  They don’t have access to your staff’s login, and OCLC does not recognize their home PC’s IP address.  What’s the solution?  There are two.  Let’s call them Plan A and Plan B.
 
Plan A is to use whatever tool you currently use to let your patrons connect to your online subscription resources from home.  If it can take patrons to a ’success URL” for those resources, it can probably do the same for OCLC’s FloridaCat.  When your patrons use Gale tools or Ebsco tools from home, the vendors know they’re your patrons, and you get the usage stats.  So, you may already have the tool you need to let OCLC recognize your patrons.  But if you don’t, we go to Plan B.
 
Plan B is RPA.  We have it at TBLC, and we know it is pretty versatile, because we’ve used it with many libraries in the past.  So, RPA would become the middleman between your system and FloridaCat.  Here’s the short version.  The FloridaCat link on your web site takes the patron to RPA at TBLC.  RPA gets his barcode, looks him up in your patron database, and–if he really is your patron–sends him to FloridaCat with a note pinned to his shirt that tells OCLC what library he started at.
 
This is Plan B and not Plan A, because there are some complications in authenticating patrons from multiple library systems to the same database.  If you use your own authentication system, it is easier to make sure OCLC knows what the patron’s home library is.
 
Now, go back to my original statement of what it will take to let your patrons continue to make their own ILL requests.  I hope the ‘long version’ fleshed out the details of the short version without messing up its clarity.
 
Now, where is Navigator in all this?  As I write this on September 1, we don’t know for sure.  OCLC and The State Library have not yet cut their deal on its cost to the state and its availability to us.  If we get access to it later this year or early next year, it should reduce staff work at many libraries, and it may offer a better interface to search FloridaCat than we can get with the other potential OCLC interfaces.  But it won’t help anyone in September, and probably not October. 
 
Until Navigator steps up to automate staff tasks. the staff side of the new world will look a whole lot like traditional OCLC ILL.  But with one big difference.  A big, big part of our grant is helping all libraries–including yours–wring every possible drop of labor savings out of OCLC and the FirstSearch software.  Again, though, those classes start in October.

Please take this as a starting point for planning your transition out of iBorrow and into the FLIN project.  I’ll be putting out more stuff in more detail, but I didn’t want to put you to sleep so early in the project.  Please contact me with any specific or general questions you have at this time.

–Al Carlson

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 12:15 pm and is filed under iBorrow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.