National Library of Australia - Gateways

ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 58| August 2002


To Be the Best in Document Delivery

Getting items for your users more often, faster and cheaper is the focus of a new course on best practice in interlibrary loans and document delivery (ILL/DD) being run now around the country. This practical, half-day course assists you to analyse and improve workflows. It was commissioned by the National Resource Sharing Working Group (NRSWG), and is aimed at staff working in ILL/DD or managing these operations.

It is based on the seminal Interlibrary Loans and Document Delivery Benchmarking Study. The report of the study was released last year and is available from the NRSWG home page at: www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/nrswg/

The course arms you with skills to describe and analyse your workflows and processes. You will learn what contributes to improving turnaround time and fill rates, while still keeping costs low, and it includes examples from real libraries which were identified as best practice models in the benchmarking study.

‘To be inspired by other practices and other libraries and to get other ideas’ was a comment from one person who has attended the course.

More information on the courses, including when they are being run, will be posted to discussion lists and advertised on the NRSWG home page www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/nrswg/

The course is the first of a series of initiatives that the NRSWG is working on in response to the Benchmarking Study. The NRSWG is finalising plans for a major national forum to be held later this year on resource sharing models and policies, ones which will meet the future needs of users.
—Tom Ruthven

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