I recently revised CV to include the following line:

Manage interlibrary loan systems; increased the local fulfillment rate from 59% to 80% while decreasing average turnaround time

I thought it would be good to provide a little additional context for this claim by supplying some data, look at visualizing that improvement, talk about how we accomplished this change here at North Park, as well as what I learned from looking at the data.

Data and Visualizations

I wrote some custom SQL to extract this data from our ILS. Because our ILS is not open source – and I’ve been scolding for posting SQL here before! – I’m not able to post this.

I decided to look at data from 7/1/2013 to present – about 30,000 requests in all. Here is that data visualized.

Comments

Since I took over in June/July of 2015, I think there have been some noticeable improvements…with a few exceptions.

Improvements

So how did we make these improvement in our interlibrary loan efficiency? Like many improvements, this change is actually the product of many small changes. These “small changes” include:

1. We created a dedicated team of interlibrary loan student workers. This small team of 3 students was able to focus on that specialized work and decreased turnaround time.
2. We removed lending restrictions or, in certain cases, made lending restrictions more transparent. We updated our internal library policies to lend a greater share of our library collection, including curriculum materials, DVDs and CDs, and current year titles. These changes greatly increased our fill rate.
3. We improved our missing item workflows. Previously, if an item was not found we would cancel the request but never start a search for that item. If an item is not on the shelf, we now mark that item as missing – this prevents future ILL requests and puts the item into the newly developed search process.

I believe that the major improvements to ILL efficiency are due largely to these three changes.

Exceptions (Future Improvements)

Looking at the data, though encouraging, actually had two other stories that I think are worth pondering and learning from.

1. January turnaround times are rough. This is certainly due to the Holiday Break and the extended hold life (i.e. requests placed over the break should last until the library re-opens in January). It’s interesting to see those “peaks” and I have learned to staff those first few days much better now.
2. We had a rough summer. May and June saw a much lower fill rate and a much higher rate of promoted and expired requests. This is largely due to some staffing changes. I see this as the flip side of having a small, dedicated staff – unexpected absences are much harder to cover.

So I think the challenge for me this coming year is the expand the team of student workers (from 3 to 4) to better respond to unexpected situations. I’m encouraged that the last few months have returned to the improved norms that we established a year ago and think we can continue this level of service.